When the door of No. 22 Great Mornington Street clashed behind Mr. Brabazon, instead of at once proceeding about his business, whatever that might be, he paused on the topmost step and stared first up the street and then down it, like a man whose faculties for the time being had gone wool-gathering. But it was not so much that as it was the strange, sudden sense of homelessness which had come over him, for No. 22 might be said to be the only home he had known since he was quite a child, although during the last few years, since his uncle had taken to living so much abroad, he had crossed its threshold but seldom.

As he stood there he found it hard to realise that, in all likelihood, the old familiar door had closed behind him for the last time, and that the tie between himself and his uncle, which had been one of strong if undemonstrative affection, was severed for ever. And he owed it all to the woman he had just left! He ground his teeth together and went through a brief, but forcible form of commination, which it was, perhaps, just as well that Lady Clinton was not there to hear.

But he could not stand on the step all day. A passing hansom inspired him with a sudden resolution. He would go and see "old Garden," and give him an account of the interview between himself and her ladyship.

He was fortunate enough to find the lawyer at home.

The old man listened to him with kindly patience, and did not interrupt his recital by a word. When Burgo had finished, he said: "It would seem from what you tell me that you and her ladyship have not only begun by being at daggers-drawn, but are likely to remain so."

"Whose fault is that? Not mine assuredly. But how is it possible for me to regard her otherwise than as my enemy? Think how she must have worked upon my uncle\'s mind before she succeeded in obtaining his consent to an act of such gross injustice! Knowing the dear old boy as I do, it is inconceivable to me how he was ever persuaded to agree to such a thing. Putting aside his affection for me, I never knew a man with a stronger sense of justice; besides which, he had always a will of his own, and knew how to assert it."

The lawyer shook his head with a smile and a pursing out of his lips. "My experience has taught me that it is often the most unlikely men, to all seeming, who succumb the soonest and the most completely to feminine influence. It is your smooth, slippery, softly good-natured sort of men--men with no angles or corners to speak of--whom the ladies find it most difficult to grasp and hold. Now you Mr. Burgo (if you will allow me to say so), with all your fine assertiveness (which, mind you, I like to see in one of your years), and that dash of Hotspur in your composition, are just the kind of man whom a certain kind of woman could twist round her little finger with the utmost ease, and that without allowing you to suspect that you were anything but very much your own master."

Burgo laughed, as if to cover the dusky flush that mounted to his cheeks. Would it be anything but happiness, he asked himself, to be, as old Garden put it, twisted round the little finger of Clara Leslie, even although he should be fully cognisant of the mode in which he was being practised upon? But, for that matter, was Clara at all the kind of girl to try to twist any man round her finger? From what he had seen of her, he felt sure she was not.

Mr. Garden coughed, and put on his gravest professional air. "To return to the interview between Lady Clinton and yourself," he said. "This seems likely to prove a very awkward business for you."

"Awkward is not the word. It simply means ruination."

"And yet you refused the cheque for a thousand guineas!"

"Under the circumstances would you have had me take it? I feel sure that had I done so you would have thought considerably worse of me than you do; which," he added, as if to himself, "it is quite needless that you should." It was an assertion the lawyer made no attempt to refute.

"Of course you have not yet had time to decide upon anything as regards your future," he observed.

"There\'s one point as to which I\'m quite clear--that I must earn my living by hook or by crook."

"And a very good thing for you that you should be compelled to do so, if I may be permitted to say so. You have led an idle life far too long, Mr. Brabazon."

"There I am at one with you. But whose is the fault? Not mine. As you are aware, several years ago I pestered my uncle to send me to Sandhurst; but he would not hear of it, nor of anything else which, in time, might have helped to make me independent of his purse-strings. As far as I see at present, there\'s only one thing left me to do, and that is to enlist as a full private in one of Her Majesty\'s regiments of dragoons."

"I hope you will do nothing so rash and ill-advised. A private soldier, indeed! Tut-tut!"

"Why not? I don\'t see that I\'m fit for anything else. And sure I am that I would enlist to-morrow if I could make certain of being sent to India, or somewhere where there was a chance of a brush with the black fellows."

"I am glad to think there\'s no such chance open to you, for, as far as I am aware, we have not even a little war on hand just now. It is just possible--hem!--that I might be able to do something for you--of course in a very humble way--in the City, or elsewhere."

Burgo smiled a little bitterly. "Thank you all the same, Mr. Garden, but when you say that, you don\'t know what a rank duffer I am--you don\'t really. I should not be a bit of use in an office of any kind. I\'m not built that way. I declare I would rather carry a sandwich-board about the streets, or break stones for a bob a day, than be perched on a stool, with a pen in my fist and a big ledger in front of me, for six hours out of the twenty-four, even if by so doing I could rake in five hundred a year, which is utterly absurd, even as a supposition."

"In any case, my serious advice to you is to do nothing in a hurry, nothing rashly. Who knows but that your uncle, when he has had more time to think over the affair, may come to the conclusion that he has dealt too hardly by you; and remembering that you are his sister\'s son, and that he has always taught the world to look upon you as his heir, will award you that measure of justice, and restore to you that measure of affection, of which, I trust, you have only been temporarily deprived?"

Burgo shook his head. "That his affection for me is just as strong as it ever was, I firmly believe. But so long as he remains in the power of that woman--so long as she retains her influence over him--so long shall I continue to be (for aught he will know to the contrary) the outcast and pauper I know myself to be at this moment."

Mr. Garden rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully with his forefinger.

"You remember what I said to you the other day," he presently remarked, "about the necessity which now exists for a fresh will?"

Burgo nodded.

"Of course, as Sir Everard\'s legal adviser, I am not justified in mentioning the fact, but in this instance I will take upon myself the responsibility of doing so. The fact to which I refer is this--that, up to the present time, I have been favoured with no instructions from your uncle for the drawing up of another will."

"That seems somewhat singular, does it not?"

"I was inclined to think so before to-day."

"And now?"

"Now I am inclined to look at the affair from an altogether different point of view. After what you have told me about Lady Clinton, I am disposed to think that she is sufficiently--I don\'t like to say artful, especially where a lady is concerned----"

"There need be no hesitation on your part in applying the term to her ladyship," interpolated Burgo with a short laugh.

"Well, then, we will say sufficiently wide-awake to persuade her husband into engaging a fresh lawyer to draw up the all-important document."

"But why on earth should she be at the trouble of doing that?"

"Knowing, as she probably does, that I have been Sir Everard\'s confidential adviser ever since he succeeded to the property, that his previous wills--he has made some half-dozen in all at different times--have been drawn up by me, and also, perhaps, being aware that you and I have been brought into frequent contact, she may have deemed it advisable for various reasons that the new will should be entrusted to a stranger, more especially should her husband have been induced, as seems by no means unlikely, to constitute her his sole legatee, to the exclusion of every one else who might be supposed to have some claim to be remembered by him."

"By Jove! I shouldn\'t wonder if you are right."

"At present we are only dealing with suppositions. It is quite possible that I may have a letter by the next post asking me to wait upon Sir Everard to-morrow morning."

"By the way," said Burgo, "may I ask whether you know anything about my dear aunt\'s antecedents?"

"I know nothing whatever about them, except that she is said to have been the widow of a certain Colonel Innes."

"Then I am in the position of being able to tell you a little more than that about her." Whereupon he proceeded to recount to Mr. Garden the information which had been retailed to him by Captain Cusden at the club. "Of course it\'s as plain as a pikestaff that the woman is nothing more than an adventuress," he finished up by saying.

The old lawyer protruded his under lip. "Is not that rather a sweeping assertion to make on no better authority than the gossip of a club acquaintance?"

"Does not what I have told you to-day with regard to myself go far to prove it? Do you suppose the dear old boy would have coldshouldered me as he has done had it not been for her? No, you know better than that. She\'s thirty years younger than he, and a remarkably handsome woman (there\'s no denying that); for what else, then, can she have married him save for his money and his position?"

"What then? Don\'t we hear of such unions every day? I presume your uncle knew what he was about when he married the handsome widow, and we have no right to suppose that he is otherwise than perfectly satisfied with his share of the bargain. All of which, Mr. Brabazon," added the old man, with a kindly inflection of the voice, "makes your case no whit the less hard."

There was a little space of silence. Burgo, with a pencil he had picked up, was idly sketching the profiles of his uncle and Lady Clinton on the blotting-pad in front of him.

"I wonder," said Mr. Garden musingly, as he proceeded to polish his spectacles with the silk handkerchief he kept by him for that purpose, "I wonder whether Lady Clinton is aware of the large sum of money which will accrue to her husband--should he live till then--some time in October next?"

Burgo paused in his sketching. "To what particular sum of money do you refer, Mr. Garden?"

"To the fifteen thousand pounds conditionally bequeathed Sir Everard by his cousin, the late Mrs. Macdona."

"What were the conditions, Mr. Garden? I have more than once heard some vague talk about such a legacy, although it was a subject my uncle always seemed to fight shy of; but nobody ever told me the real ins and outs of the affair."

"As there\'s nothing about the affair to make a secret of, there can be no harm in my telling you what I know of it," replied the lawyer. "Mrs. Macdona was Sir Everard\'s cousin on his mother\'s side. When no longer in the bloom of youth she married a man a great deal older than herself, who was a sleeping partner in one of our big London breweries. At his death she succeeded to the greater portion of his wealth, amounting to nearly a quarter of a million. She outlived her husband a score years, but never married again. She had no family, and by her will, among numerous other legacies with which we are not concerned, she bequeathed to each of her five cousins, your uncle Everard being one of them, the sum of fifteen thousand pounds, which, however, was in no case to be paid till he or she should have reached the age at which the testatrix quitted this world for a better one, which happened to be within a day or two of her sixty-fourth birthday. Should any of the legatees die before attaining that age, the fifteen thousand pounds which would otherwise have come to him or her was to be divided among certain specified charities.

"So eccentric was the will deemed that it was seriously debated by some of the legatees whether an attempt should not be made to have it set aside by a court of law. But Mrs. Macdona was known to have been such a clear-headed, shrewd, businesslike woman, that wiser counsels prevailed, and the will was left undisputed. To make a long story short, of the five cousins who were legatees, two died before reaching the age of sixty-four; one, your aunt, Mrs. Fleming, of whom you can have no recollection, seeing that she married and went with her husband to America nearly a quarter of a century ago, had the pleasure, two years since, of succeeding to her legacy; while the remaining two cousins, of whom your uncle Everard is the elder, and your uncle Denis the younger, have not yet arrived at the required age. But, as I have already remarked, next October will bring Sir Everard\'s sixty-fourth birthday, and with it his long-deferred legacy of fifteen thousand pounds."

"It will be fifteen thousand pities if he should live to succeed to it merely that it may ultimately help to enrich that she-cormorant his wife! Not but what her nest will be pretty well feathered without that, should she outlive my uncle."

"Yes; although not especially wealthy for a man of his rank and social position, Sir Everard is a long way from being a pauper. As I happen to know, he has always made a point of living well within his income, although what he will do, or be persuaded into doing, now that he is married, it might be dangerous to prophesy. His only extravagance, if such a term may be applied to it, has been that he could rarely or never resist a \'bargain\' in the way of curios, coins, or bric-à-brac; which, however, he looks upon as a judicious investment of capital, his contention being that after his death his collection will sell for far more than it originally cost him--which may, or may not, prove to be the case. At any rate, whatever money he has put away (whether it be hundreds or thousands, is no concern of ours) is invested in sound English stock which pays a fair rate of dividend. Yes, if Lady Clinton should outlive her husband and succeed to all he has to leave, the world will deem her a very fortunate woman."

Mr. Brabazon rose and took possession of his hat. He felt that the interview, without having been productive of any positive benefit to him, or having served in any way to modify the facts of his position, had yet done him good. It was something to have secured the sympathy and goodwill of the kind-hearted old man; and that, however undemonstrative his manner might be, or however guarded his utterances, he had secured them he felt fully assured. The cloud had lifted in some measure, and his heart felt lighter, he knew not why, than it had felt an hour before.

The lawyer also rose. There were two or three people in the outer office waiting to see him.

"Don\'t forget my advice," he said. "Do nothing rashly, or in a hurry. Remember that the chapter of accidents may nearly always be counted on as a big asset, especially when one is still as young as you are. I have your present address by me, but should you change your venue, let me know. Also, don\'t forget to advise me should there be any change in the present relations between your uncle and yourself. But, for that matter, I don\'t know why you shouldn\'t come and look me up as often as you feel inclined. One can say in five minutes more than one can convey in half a dozen sheets of foolscap, and you know without my telling you that I shall always be glad to see you. And now one last word"--here he laid a kindly hand for a moment on the young man\'s shoulder. "I don\'t suppose you are very flush of cash--it would be rather an uncommon state of affairs with you if you were, wouldn\'t it? Well, seeing that one source of supplies has run dry, it behoves you to look out for another. Let me be that other, Mr. Brabazon; let me be your banker till brighter fortunes dawn upon you. I have a tidy little balance lying idle at the bank, and if----"

Burgo caught him suddenly by the hand and gripped it hard, very hard. "My dear Mr. Garden--my dear old friend," he said, and then he had to pause for a moment before he could go on, "not a word more of this just now. I have still a few pounds by me, and by the time they are gone I hope to have settled on something definite as regards my future. But should it ever be my fortune, or misfortune, to be stone-broke (which is by no means an unlikely thing to happen), and to find myself without a shilling to pay for my night\'s lodging, then I promise you that you shall be the first of whom I will ask that help which I can no longer do without."