"This dear old place is my childhood's home. My earliest recollection is of living here with my mother and my grandfather. My father, Captain Rivers, who was heir to the whole property, died when I was three years old. I barely remember him. The property was entailed on male heirs, and failing my father, it came to a younger brother of my grandfather, a great-uncle of mine, a certain Falcon Rivers, who had fallen out with most of his relations, gone to live in America, and made a large fortune out there. My grandfather and my mother never spoke of Uncle Falcon, and I remember, as a child, having the instinctive feeling that even to think of Uncle Falcon was an insidious form of sin. It therefore had its attractions. I quite often thought of Uncle Falcon!

"Toward the close of his life, my grandfather became involved in money difficulties. Much of the estate was mortgaged. I was too young and heedless to understand details, but it all resulted in this: that when my grandfather died, he was unable to leave much provision for my mother, or for me. We had to turn out of Riverscourt; Uncle Falcon was returning to take possession. So we went to live in town, on the merest pittance, and in what, after the luxuries to which I had always been accustomed, appeared to me abject poverty. I was then nineteen. My mother, who had been older than my father, was over fifty.

"Then followed two very hard years. Uncle Falcon wrote to my mother; but she refused to see him, or to have any communication with him. She would not show me his letter. We were absolutely cut off from the old home, and all our former surroundings. Once or twice we heard, in roundabout ways, how much Uncle Falcon's wealth was doing for the old place. Mortgages were all paid off; tumbled-down cottages were being rebuilt; the farms were put into proper order, and let to good tenants. American money has a way of being useful, even in proud old England.

"Any mention of all this, filled my mother with an extreme bitterness, to which I had not then the key, and which I completely failed to understand.

"One morning, at breakfast, she received an envelope, merely containing a thin slip of paper. Her beautiful face—my mother was a very lovely woman—went, as they say in story-books, whiter than the table-cloth. She tore the paper across, and across again, and flung the fragments into the fire. They missed the flames, and fluttered down into the fender. I picked them up, and, right before her, pieced them together. It was a cheque from Uncle Falcon for a thousand pounds. 'Oh, Mamma dear!' I said. I was so tired of running after omnibuses, and pretending we liked potted meat lunches.

"She snatched the fragments out of my fingers, and dropped them into the heart of the fire.