Time’s wheels went slow thereafter at Mortgrange. Sir Wilton missed his firstborn. Whatever annoyed him in his wife or any of her children fed his desire for Richard. Arthur did not please him. He had in no way distinguished himself—and some men are annoyed when their sons prove only a little better than themselves. Percy was a poisoned thorn in his side. He was even worse than his father. All his thoughts took refuge in Richard.

He had become dissatisfied with his agent, and although he had never taken an interest in business, distrust made him now look into things a little. He called his lawyer from London, and had him make a thorough investigation. Dismissing his agent as a result, he would have Arthur take charge of the estate. But the young man, with an inborn dislike to figures, flatly refused, saying he preferred the army. Sir Wilton did not like the army. He had been in it himself, and had left it in a hurry—no one ever knew why.

The only comfort in the house occupied the soul of lady Ann. It was that she heard nothing of the bookbinder fellow. She had grown so lethargic that when Danger was not flattening his nose against the windowpane, she was at peace. A lawyer of her own had the will in his keeping, and she had come upon no trace of another.

But when sir Wilton sent for his lawyer to look into his factor’s accounts, he had a further use for him, of which his wife heard nothing—he made him draw up another will, in which he left everything to Richard, only son of his first wife, Robina Armour.

With every precaution for secrecy, the will was signed and witnessed, but when the lawyer would have carried it with him, the baronet declined to give it up. He laid it aside for a week, then had the horses put to, and drove to find Mr. Wingfold, of whom he had heard from Richard.

When he saw him, man of the world as he was, he was impressed by the simplicity of a clergyman without a touch of the clerical, without any look of what he called sanctity—the look that comes upon a man cherishing the notion that he is intrusted with things more sacred than God will put in the hands of his other children. Such men, and they are many, one would like to lay for a time in the sheet of Peter’s vision, among the four-footed animals and creeping things, to learn that, as there is nothing common or unclean, so is there no class more sacred than another.

The baronet asked for a private interview, and told the parson he wanted to place in his keeping a certain paper, with the understanding that he would not open it for a year after his death, and would then act upon the directions contained in it.

“Provided always,” Wingfold stipulated, “that they require of me nothing unfit, impossible, or wrong.”