“But Ambrose was Harold’s father,” I exclaimed in bewilderment, “and he was the eldest.”

“The seniority was not considered as certain,” said Mr. Prosser, “and therefore the late Mr. Alison left the property to the eldest child born at home.  ‘Let us at least have an English-born heir,’ I remember he said to me.”

“And that is just what I am not,” said Harold.

“I cannot understand!  I have heard Miss Woolmer talk of poor Ambrose’s beautiful child, several months older than Eustace’s, and his name was Harold.”

“Yes,” said Harold, “but that one died on the voyage out, an hour or two before I was born.  He was Harold Stanislas.  I have no second name.”

“And I always was the eldest,” reiterated Eustace, hardly yet understanding what it involved.

All the needful documents had been preserved and brought home.  There was the extract from the captain’s log recording the burial at sea of Harold Stanislas Alison, aged fifteen months, and the certificate of baptism by a colonial clergyman of Harold, son of Ambrose and Alice Alison, while Eustace was entered in the Northchester register, having been born in lodgings, as Mr. Prosser well recollected, while his poor young father lay under sentence of death.

It burst on him at last.  “Do you mean that I have got it, and not you?”

“That’s about it,” said Harold.  “Never mind, Eu, it will all come to the same thing in the end.”

“You have none of it!”

“Not an acre.  It all goes together; but don’t look at me in that way.  There’s Boola Boola, you know.”

“You’re not going back there to leave me?” exclaimed Eustace, with a real sound of dismay, laying hold of his arm.

“Not just yet, at any rate,” said Harold.

“No, no; nor at all,” reiterated Eustace, and then, satisfied by the absence of contradiction, which did, in fact, mean a good deal from the silent Harold, he began to discover his own accession of dignity.  “Then it all belongs to me.  I am master.  I am squire—­Eustace Alison, Esquire, of Arghouse.  How well it sounds.  Doesn’t it, Harry, doesn’t it, Lucy?  Uncle Smith always said I was the one cut out for high life.  Besides, I’ve been presented, and have been to a ball at Government House.”

I saw that Mr. Prosser was a little overcome with amusement, and I wanted to make my retreat and carry off Dora, but she had perched on her favourite post—­Harold’s knee—­and I was also needed to witness Eustace’s signatures, as well as on some matters connected with my own property.  So I stayed, and saw that he did indeed seem lost without his cousin’s help.  Neither knew anything about business of this kind, but Harold readily understood what made Eustace so confused, that he was quite helpless without Harold’s explanations, and rather rough directions what he was to do.  How like themselves their writing was!  Eustace’s neat and clerkly, but weak and illegible; and Harold’s as distinct, and almost as large, as a schoolboy’s copy, but with square-turned joints and strength of limb unlike any boy’s writing.