He nodded, holding his hand to his forehead.
“Bad news?”
“Yes,” he answered, as though speaking in a dream. “Very bad ... wonderful!”
She could not help smiling, and her intuition quickly jumped to the truth. “Somebody has died and left you some money?” she suggested.
He uttered an almost hysterical laugh. “I’m free!” he cried. “Free! I shall never have to go back to the mines.”
He sprang to his feet, folding the newspaper, and crushing it in his hand.
“Don’t go and faint again,” she said, quietly.
He laughed loudly, and a moment later was hastening into the hotel. He snatched his hat from a peg in the hall, and hurried out through the dusty little garden at the front of the building, and so into the afternoon glare of the main road. Here he hailed a carriage, and, telling the driver to take him to the Eastern Exchange Telegraph office, sat back on the jolting seat, and directed his eyes once more to the Agony Column of the newspaper. The incredible message read thus:
James Champernowne Tundering-West, heir to the late Stephen Tundering-West, of the Manor, Eversfield, Oxon, is requested to communicate with Messrs. Browne & Beadle, 135a, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.
His uncle was dead, then, and the two sons, his unknown cousins, must have predeceased him or died with him! He had never for one moment thought of himself as a possible heir to the little property; and heaven knows how long it might have been before he would have had knowledge of his good fortune had he not chanced upon this old newspaper.