“When you receive this, little pal Sara”—­ran the letter—­“I shall have done with this world.  Except that it means leaving you, my dear, I shall be glad to go, for I’m a very tired man.  So, when it comes, you must try not to grudge me my ‘long leave.’  But there are several things you ought to know, and which I want you to know, yet I have never been able to bring myself to speak of them to you.  To tell you about them meant digging into the past—­and very often there is a hot coal lingering in the heart of a dead fire that is apt to burn the fingers of whoever rakes out the ashes.  Frankly, then, I funked it.  But now the time has come when I can’t put it off any longer.

“Little old pal, have you ever wondered why I loved you so much—­why you stood so close to my heart?  I used to tease you and say it was because we were no relation to each other, didn’t I?  If you had been really my niece, proper respect (on your part, of course, for your aged uncle!) and the barrier of a generation would have set us the usual miles apart.  But there was never anything of that with us, was there?  I bullied you, I know, when you needed it, but we were always comrades.  And to me, you were something more than a comrade, something almost sacred and always adorable—­the child of the woman I loved.

“For we should have been married, Sara, your mother and I, had I not been a poor man.  We were engaged, but at that time, I was only a younger son, with a younger son’s meager portion, and the prospect of my falling heir to Barrow seemed of all things the most improbable.  And Pauline Malincourt, your mother, had been taught to abhor the idea of living on small means—­trained to regard her beauty and breeding as marketable assets, to go to the highest bidder.  For, although her parents came of fine old stock—­there’s no better blood in England than the Malincourt strain, my dear—­they were deadly hard-up.  So hard-up, that when they died—­as the result of a carriage accident which occurred a week after Pauline’s marriage—­they left nothing behind them but debts which your father liquidated.

“Of your father, Caleb Tennant, the millionaire, I will not write, seeing that, after all, you are his child.  It is enough to say that he was a hard man, and that he and your mother led a very unhappy life together, so unhappy that at last she left him, choosing rather to live in utter poverty than remain with him.  He never forgave her for leaving him, and when he died, he willed every penny he possessed to some scoundrelly cousin of his—­who is presumably enjoying the inheritance which should have been yours.

“That is your family history, my dear, and it is right that you should know it—­and know what you have to fight against.  To be a Malincourt is at once to have a curse and a blessing hung round your neck.  The Malincourts were originally of French extraction—­descendants of the haute noblesse of old France—­cursed with the devil’s own pride and passionate self-will, and blessed with looks and brains and charm above the average.  They never bend; they break sooner.  And I think you’ve got the lot, Sara—­the full inheritance.