“But I haven’t lived in the courts of law.  I wish I could give you the information you want.”

Mr. Sarrazin looked at his watch.  “For all I know to the contrary,” he said, “we may be wasting precious time while we are talking here.  Will you excuse me if I go away to my club?”

“Are you going in search of information?”

“Yes.  We have some inveterate old whist-players who are always to be found in the card-room.  One of them formerly practiced, I believe, in the Scotch courts.  It has just occurred to me that the chance is worth trying.”

“Will you let me know if you succeed?” Randal asked.

The lawyer took his hand at parting.  “You seem to be almost as anxious about it as I am,” he said.

“To tell you the truth, I am a little alarmed when I think of Catherine.  If there is another long delay, how do we know what may happen before the law has confirmed the mother’s claim to the child?  Let me send one of the servants here to wait at your club.  Will you give him a line telling me when the trial is likely to take place?”

“With the greatest pleasure.  Good-night.”

Left alone, Randal sat by the fireside for a while, thinking of the future.  The prospect, as he saw it, disheartened him.  As a means of employing his mind on a more agreeable subject for reflection, he opened his traveling desk and took out two or three letters.  They had been addressed to him, while he was in America, by Captain Bennydeck.

The captain had committed an error of which most of us have been guilty in our time.  He had been too exclusively devoted to work that interested him to remember what was due to the care of his health.  The doctor’s warnings had been neglected; his over-strained nerves had given way; and the man whose strong constitution had resisted cold and starvation in the Arctic wastes, had broken down under stress of brain-work in London.

This was the news which the first of the letters contained.

The second, written under dictation, alluded briefly to the remedies suggested.  In the captain’s case, the fresh air recommended was the air of the sea.  At the same time he was forbidden to receive either letters or telegrams, during his absence from town, until the doctor had seen him again.  These instructions pointed, in Captain Bennydeck’s estimation, to sailing for pleasure’s sake, and therefore to hiring a yacht.

The third and last letter announced that the yacht had been found, and described the captain’s plans when the vessel was ready for sea.

He proposed to sail here and there about the Channel, wherever it might please the wind to take him.  Friends would accompany him, but not in any number.  The yacht was not large enough to accommodate comfortably more than one or two guests at a time.  Every now and then, the vessel would come to an anchor in the bay of the little coast town of Sandyseal, to accommodate friends going and coming and (in spite