"But Ambrose was Harold's father," I exclaimed in bewilderment, "and he was the eldest."
"The seniority was not considered as certain," said Mr. Prosser, "and therefore the late Mr. Alison left the property to the eldest child born at home. 'Let us at least have an English-born heir,' I remember he said to me."
"And that is just what I am not," said Harold.
"I cannot understand! I have heard Miss Woolmer talk of poor Ambrose's beautiful child, several months older than Eustace's, and his name was Harold."
"Yes," said Harold, "but that one died on the voyage out, an hour or two before I was born. He was Harold Stanislas. I have no second name."
"And I always was the eldest," reiterated Eustace, hardly yet understanding what it involved.
All the needful documents had been preserved and brought home. There was the extract from the captain's log recording the burial at sea of Harold Stanislas Alison, aged fifteen months, and the certificate of baptism by a colonial clergyman of Harold, son of Ambrose and Alice Alison, while Eustace was entered in the Northchester register, having been born in lodgings, as Mr. Prosser well recollected, while his poor young father lay under sentence of death.
It burst on him at last. "Do you mean that I have got it, and not you?"
"That's about it," said Harold. "Never mind, Eu, it will all come to the same thing in the end."
"You have none of it!"