"What's the matter with you, Marion? You are not going to faint again today?"

"I hope not, aunt."

"Then what is the matter with you, my dear? You are shaking as if you had the ague. You are not able to hold those papers in your hand. Who was that large letter from this morning?"

"Charlie, aunt."

"I thought Charlie was too ill to write?"

"A Doctor Rowland wrote it for him."

"And has Doctor Rowland written for Charles such a dreadful letter, so dreadfully unkind a letter, that it takes your breath and your senses away? Come over here to me, my little girl, and tell me all about it."

"It is not unkind, aunt; it's worse. It is dreadful."

"Now, now, Marion, you must not allow yourself to be carried away by every little thing connected with Charlie. Is he worse?"

"No. He's going on well, the doctor says."

"Well, then, child, come over to me and bring all those papers with you; and first of all read out what the doctor says."

With the look of one overwhelmed with sorrow, May crossed the room, carrying the papers in one hand down by her side, and in the other, holding against her brown-red cheek, a tress of her dark hair, which had escaped the fastening behind her head.

She sat down in her low easy-chair behind her aunt, and, having placed the more voluminous documents on the ground beside her, rested one elbow on an elbow of the chair, and began reading out in a doleful voice:

"Dear Madam,

"I am still in medical attendance on both the Duke of Shropshire and Mr. Cheyne, and I have to report with sorrow that the condition of his grace causes the gravest anxiety. Additional medical assistance has been summoned since the hasty note I wrote you a few days ago; but the universal opinion of the medical men is that his grace is not likely to last many days. An old acquaintance and I take the watching in turns.

"With regard to Mr. Cheyne, I am happy to be able to report that he is going on better than we had anticipated. All signs of fever have left him, and he has now only to pull up strength to be no worse than when he first came to this neighbourhood. You may rest quite assured he shall want nothing that can be got or done for him here. He has communicated to me the understanding which exists between you and him, and has desired me to write as much as I please of my own will, and then asked me to take the rest from his dictation. So far I have written from myself. Before I begin taking down his words I may tell you that I am one of the crustiest of old bachelor doctors; but the story which Mr. Cheyne has to tell you is of so romantic a character that I cannot avoid feeling an interest in it, and that if there is anything I can do in the matter for you I shall be most happy to act.

"Your faithful Servant,

"Oliver Rowland."

Then came Cheyne's letter to May, written out for him by Dr. Rowland.

"My dearest May,

"Doctor Rowland will tell you that I am rapidly getting better, and that in a few days I may hope to be able to get up and about. For the first time, this morning they allowed me to look through the letters lying here for me, among which were two from your own good hand, dear, and two more from other sources. These four are all that I need mention now; and of your own you will, for an obvious reason, see why I must confine myself to thanks and good wishes, and telling you how glad I was to hear that you and your kind aunt are so well. I pray you may both continue so.

"And now for the other two.

"One of them is from an old friend of mine of whom you have often heard me speak, and whom you met more than once--Edward Graham, the artist, who, as I told you, has been painting a picture under Anerly Bridge, in Devonshire. This letter is accompanied by a story which goes back to the year before I was born, and tells of a certain marriage in that village between George Temple Cheyne and Harriet Mansfield.

"The second letter is from Mrs. Mansfield of Wyechester, in which she tells me that she is the mother of the Harriet Mansfield married at Anerly, and that I am the only child of that Anerly marriage.

"And now, May dearest, prepare yourself for a most astounding discovery.

"The letter from my grandmother contained several other papers, among them one in my father's and one in my mother's writing. I will not plague you with details, but the facts are simply these:

"My mother met my father by accident, and ran away with him. She thought him a plain gentleman, and for two reasons he wished to keep their marriage private for a while. The first of these was that a rich relative had promised to hand him over a large fortune if he did not marry up to a certain age--an age he had not then reached, though he should reach it in a short time. The second was that a number of men to whom he owed money knew of this, and would have been down on him at once if they suspected him of having married.

"Accordingly the secret was kept, and the married pair went away on the Continent. Here my father caught sound of a rumour that his creditors were on the look-out for him; and, leaving instructions with his wife to remain in Brussels, he went away. She never saw her husband again; and when dying she told the nurse to bring me to my grandmother Mansfield, at Wyechester, at the same time giving in charge to the good woman, for my grandmother, some papers my father had left behind him, with instructions that they were not to be opened until a certain future time. My grandmother provided for me secretly, and had me ultimately put into the publishing house in London.

"It appears my father, on reaching England, being a man always variable and fickle in love, went straight to the village of Anerly, and tried to bribe the clerk to tear out of the register the leaf containing the entry of my father and mother's marriage; but he failed. This part I learn from Graham's story.

"May, I have been a long time preparing you for what is to come. Let it come all at once.

"Now this George Temple Cheyne, my father, was the only brother of the late Duke of Shropshire, and I am first cousin of the present Duke, and heir-presumptive to the titles and estates."

For a moment the woman looked into the girl's eyes. Then Miss Traynor said:

"Marion, dear, read the last bit over again."

The girl did so in a dull, monotonous voice.

"Marion, could it be that his head has been hurt, and he is wandering in his mind?" asked the old lady hopefully.

"But, aunt, the doctor might humour him by writing it down, yet he would hardly send it off to humour him."

"That is very true, Marion; very true," admitted the aunt, ruefully. Then, after a pause, she brightened up wonderfully, and cried in a triumphant voice: "I have it, Marion--I have it! It is a chapter of one of his novels he has sent you by mistake."

"But," said May despairingly, pointing to the documents at her feet, "what are these? I did not read out all the letter, aunt. He tells me, after where I stopped, to go with these things to Macklin and Dowell, his solicitors, ask them to read the papers over, and await further instructions until he comes up to town."

The aunt was not going to be baffled. She pondered a long time, and at last cried out cheerfully:

"But, Marion, my dear, his solicitors and the other solicitors may find out some flaw--some flaw that may spoil all."

The girl shot a bright glance up.

"Oh, aunt, thank you for that hope. It was good of you to think of it. I hope with all my heart it may be so."

Marion stooped down and gathered up all the papers at her feet.

For a long time neither spoke. May sat with her lap full of papers, and her eyes fixed dully upon them. Miss Traynor had fallen into a deep reverie, her elbow on the white cloth of the breakfast-table, her white round chin dropped into her white round hand. The elder was the first to speak, and when she did it was in a very timid and apologetic way, as though she was more than half ashamed of referring to such a subject.

"Isn't a duke the greatest after the Queen and the Princes and the Princesses, May?"

"I believe so."

"And he has a right to be presented to the Court, and know the Queen; and maybe now and then she asks a duke or two to dine with her, and advise her what to do about Parliament and Radicals and foreign possessions, and so on?"

"I believe so, aunt dear."

"It is wonderful to think of it! Wonderful to think of it! To think that the young man we knew in this humble little house as Charlie will be sitting down to gold services with the Queen, and that we shall see his name in The Court Circular--'The Duke of Shropshire visited the Queen yesterday, and afterwards enjoyed the honour of dining with Her Majesty.' Wonderful!"

From the lids of the girl's eyes the tears now began to fall. The old Duke had been drowned, the present Duke was dying, and her Charlie, her own, her only darling Charlie, was to be the new Duke. And they should read all those dreadful things in The Court Circular and elsewhere; and she should scarcely be able to take up any kind of a paper in which she should not find his name; but it was plain to her she had lost himself. She, the sweetheart, the wife of a great duke!--she blushed crimson with shame at the bare thought, and she wept for sorrow that a dukedom should rob her of her dear lover.

The elder woman's thoughts went on in quite a different way.

She had, of course, often seen lords and ladies in the Park and the theatres and other places of public assembly, but she had never spoken to one. Her father had, of course, spoken to many, and had been presented at Court; but then her father was to her a god apart, quite as much apart as the members of the peerage. She had, as far as she could now recollect, never seen a duke, except the Duke of Wellington. But then he wasn't a great duke to her mind. He was a great captain, a great soldier, but the ducal quality in him was too new to be interesting. It was overborne by the splendour of his achievements and the glory of his renown. The dukedom was no more in him than the scarf he had put on that morning. But a duke proper, from her point of view, she had never seen; one of whose house there had been dukes three hundred years ago had never come within her ken, and of such dukes she stood in awe, not knowing what manner of men they might be. She had heard of the Dukeries as of some mysterious region, upon which nothing earthly could compel her to enter. She had, of course, seen royal dukes; but these she looked upon as only princes of the blood masquerading.

She had never in all her life spoken to a lord or a lady; and beyond what she read of them in books, which she believed to be mostly lies, she had no means of forming any notion of how they spoke. She knew that judges on the bench were not as other men, and did not speak as other men; but judges were only common men, had been only common barristers at one time. Had a lord spoken to her she should not have known what to say. She should in all likelihood have said Yes or No without any discrimination, and retired. She would not say Yes or No, my lord, for all the world; for to say so would have been to admit she knew the honour which had been thrust upon her; and the burden of such an admission she could not bear. She had a notion that members of the peerage were as much removed from sympathy with common mortals as birds or fishes; and when, once a year or so, in looking idly down the columns of The Times, she could not help seeing that a noble lord had said something about turnips or calves, she hastened on, shocked and affrighted as much as though a clergyman, in whom she had always trusted, had one Sunday, in the pulpit, advised his congregation to come no more to church, but to spend the day in playing whist and billiards, and dancing and singing, and eating and drinking.

But now what had arisen? A man whom she had known for years, who had crossed her threshold hundreds of times, who had sat on every chair in that little drawing-dining-room, who had eaten her beef and broken her eggs at his tea, who had rolled her chair from one room into the other, who had made the salad for tea and praised the condition of her beer, who had kissed her niece in her presence over and over again, and had promised to be a good husband to that young girl, whom she now loved more than all else on earth--this man was now about to be lifted into the front rank of the peerage! He was to be a duke--the ducal son of she knew not how many fathers! It was prodigious! unbelievable!

And what would come of it all? Would he remember them? Plainly: for had he not sent the important papers to Marion? And there was the girl, wretched and dispirited. Why? Ah well, she might guess. Charles Augustus Cheyne with a few hundreds a year from his pen, and Charles Augustus Cheyne, Duke of Shropshire and master of how much wealth she knew not, were widely different persons. But, after all, who could tell? She had met Mr. Cheyne, and liked him. She had never met a duke--how could she tell what would be her feelings towards a duke if she met one? And then the fact of Cheyne and a duke being one! She should let matters take their course, and see how they would turn out.

"Marion dear," she said at the end of these cogitations, "what is it you are to do with those papers Charles sent you?"

"Take them to Macklin and Dowell."

"And had you not better do so at once? They are of the highest consequence."

"Yes, aunt."

She rose and went to her room, and dressed herself listlessly: and when she was dressed, a cab was called and she drove away. She was not more than an hour at Macklin and Dowell's. When she was leaving, the two members of the firm conducted her to the cab. The last words they said to her, as they handed her into the vehicle, were:

"If the documents and the history are good, the case is clear; and we have every reason to believe both are good."

When she found herself alone in the cab rolling to Knightsbridge, she covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed hysterically:

"I wish the history and the documents had left Charlie alone, and left him to me."