Here he grows remorseful again.  Abuse a man dead and gone, and one, too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor, was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who was only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the chance, seems but a poor thing.  The professor’s quarrel with his father had been caused by the young man’s refusal to accept a Government appointment—­obtained with some difficulty—­for the very insufficient and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason, that he had made up his mind to devote his life to science.  Wynter, too, was a scientist of no mean order, and would, probably, have made his mark in the world, if the world and its pleasures had not made their mark on him.  He had been young Curzon’s coach at one time, and finding the lad a kindred spirit, had opened out to him his own large store of knowledge, and steeped him in that great sea of which no man yet has drank enough—­for all begin, and leave it, athirst.

Poor Wynter!  The professor, turning in his stride up and down the narrow, uncomfortable room, one of the many that lie off the Strand, finds his eyes resting on that other letter—­carelessly opened, barely begun.

From Wynter’s solicitor!  It seems ridiculous that Wynter should have had a solicitor.  With a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and begins to read it.  At the end of the second page, he starts, re-reads a sentence or two, and suddenly his face becomes illuminated.  He throws up his head.  He cackles a bit.  He looks as if he wants to say something very badly—­“Hurrah,” probably—­only he has forgotten how to do it, and finally goes back to the letter again, and this time—­the third time—­finishes it.

Yes.  It is all right!  Why on earth hadn’t he read it first? So the girl is to be sent to live with her aunt after all—­an old lady—­maiden lady.  Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury.  Miss Jane Majendie.  Mother’s sister evidently.  Wynter’s sisters would never have been old maids, if they had resembled him, which probably they did—­if he had any.  What a handsome fellow he was! and such a good-natured fellow too.

The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his.  After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter of anything but good nature.  Well!  He had wronged him there.  He glances at the letter again.

He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems.  Guardian of her fortune, rather than of her.

The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the—­er—­pleasure of her society—­he, of the estate only.