'Believe it!' Dick answered. 'I don't believe it; I know it is—the wretched stuff! There's no dodging plain facts. I can't get out of it, anyhow.'
'Did you realize that this money would be yours when you saw the entries at Framlingham?' Gillespie inquired, hardly certain how to treat such incredible behaviour.
'I didn't think of it just at once,' Dick answered with profound despair in his voice; 'but it occurred to me in the train, and I thought how terrible it would be to confess it before the whole world by claiming the wretched money. Though it might perhaps be some consolation, after all, to poor mother.'
'And you, Maud?' Gillespie inquired, turning round to his sweetheart, and with difficulty repressing a smile. 'Did you think at all of it?'
'Well, I knew if we were really only false Plantagenets, like the Sheffield people,' Maud answered bravely through the tears that struggled hard to fall, 'we should probably in the end come into their money. But oh, Archie, it isn't the money Dick and I would care for. Let them take back their wealth—let them take it—if they will! But give us once more our own Plantagenet ancestry!'
Gillespie drew Mary aside for a moment.
'Say nothing to them about it for the present,' he whispered in her ear. 'Let the first keen agony of their regret pass over. I can understand their feeling. This myth had worn itself into the very warp and woof of their natures. It was their one great inheritance. The awakening is a terrible shock to them. All they thought themselves once, all they practically were for so many years together, they have suddenly ceased to be. This grief and despair must wear itself out. For the present we mustn't even inquire of them about the money.'
And indeed it was a week or two before Dick could muster up heart to go with Archie Gillespie to a lawyer about the matter. When he did, however, he had all the details of the genealogy, all the proofs of that crushing identification he had longed to avoid, so fully at his finger-ends, that the solicitor whom he consulted, and to whom he showed copies of the various documents in the case, hadn't a moment's doubt as to the result of his application. 'I suppose this will be a long job, though,' Gillespie suggested, 'and may want a lot of money, to prosecute it to its end?
It'll have to be taken for an indefinite time into Chancery, won't it?'
'Not at all,' the solicitor answered. 'It's very plain sailing. We can get it through at once. There's no hitch in the evidence. You see, it isn't as if there were any opposition to the claim, any other descendants. There are none, and by the very nature of the case there can't be any. Mr. Plantagenet has anticipated and accounted for every possible objection. The thing is as clear as mud. His official experience has enabled him to avoid all the manifold pitfalls of amateur genealogists. I never saw an inheritance that went so far back made more absolutely certain.'