'A codicil was framed, or nearly so, revoking much that had gone before; but was never signed. By that omission——'
'I have lost all,' said Roland, starting to his feet; 'so the fortunes of the Lindsays of Earlshaugh are at their lowest ebb.'
'Unless you can find an heiress,' said the lawyer, with another of his weak smiles.
Annot was no heiress, Roland remembered.
'As for my father's folly,' he was beginning bitterly, when M'Wadsett touched his arm:
'Let us not speak ill of the dead,' said he; 'the late Laird may have been deceived, misled—let us not wrong him.'
'But he has wronged the living, who have to feel—to endure and to suffer!'
'The folly of your brother, the Guardsman—rather than your own—brought all this about, Captain Lindsay,' said the lawyer, rising too, as if the unprofitable interview had come to an end; and, a few minutes after, Roland found himself outside in the bustle and sunshine of George Street, that broad, stately, and magnificent thoroughfare, along which he wandered like one in a bad dream, and full of vague, angry, and bitter thoughts.
A deep sense of unmerited humiliation galled his naturally proud spirit, now that the truth of his real position had been laid before him without doubt.
The 'fool's paradise' in which he had been partly living had vanished; and he thought how much better it had been had he left his bones at Tel-el-Kebir, at Kashgate, or anywhere else in Egypt, as so many of his comrades had done.