At this important juncture a letter, post-marked in New York on the day before, was offered in court, and a demand, based on its contents, made for a stay of proceedings.  It came from the Spanish Consul, and was addressed to Abel Bigelow and John Floyd, executors of the late Captain Allen, and notified them that he had just received letters from San Juan De Porto Rico, containing information as to the existence of an heir to the estate in the person of a boy named Leon Garcia, nephew to the late Mrs. Allen.  The case was immediately laid over until the next term of court.

In the meantime, steps were promptly taken to ascertain the truth of this assumption.  An agent was sent out to the island of Porto Rico, who brought back all the proofs needed to establish the claim, and also the lad himself, who was represented to be in his fourteenth year.  He was a coarse, wicked-looking boy, who, it was plain, had not yet fully awakened to a realizing sense of the good fortune that awaited him.

A resolute opposition was made by Wallingford, but all the evidence adduced to prove Leon Garcia’s relationship to Mrs. Allen was too clear, and so the court dismissed the case, and appointed Ralph Dewey as guardian to the boy, who was immediately placed at school in a neighboring town.

So ended this long season of suspense.  Immediately on the decision of the case, Wallingford went to Boston to see Mrs. Montgomery, and remained absent nearly a week.  I saw him soon after his return.

“How did she bear this final dashing of her hopes to the earth?” I asked.

“As any one who knew her well might have expected,” he answered, with so little apparent feeling that I thought him indifferent.

“As a Christian philosopher,” said I.

“You make use of exactly the right words,” he remarked.  “Yes, as a Christian philosopher.  As one who thinks and reasons as well as feels.  I have seen a great many so-called religious people in my time.  People who had much to say about their-spiritual experiences and hopes of heaven.  But never one who so made obedience to the strict law of right, in all its plain, common-sense interpretations, a matter of common duty.  I do not believe that for anything this world could offer her, Mrs. Montgomery would swerve a hair’s breadth from justice.  I have been in the position to see her tempted; have, myself, been the tempter over and over again during the ten years in which I represented her claims to the Allen estate; but her principles were immovable as the hills.  Once, I shall never forget the incident—­I pressed her to adopt a certain course of procedure, involving a law quibble, in order to get possession of the property.  She looked at me for a moment or two, with a flushing face.  Then her countenance grew serene, almost heavenly, and she gave me this memorable reply—­’Mr. Wallingford, I have a richer estate than this in expectancy, and cannot mar the title.’  And she has not marred it, Doctor.”