The baronet sat with the newly-made will before him, gazing at the open leaves with fixed and dreamy eyes.
Now that the document was signed, a feeling of doubt had taken possession of him. He remembered how deliberately he had pondered over the step before he had disinherited his nephew; and now that work, which had cost him so much pain and thought, had been undone on the impulse of a moment.
"Have I done right, I wonder?" he asked himself.
The papers which had been tied in the packet containing the old will had been scattered on the table when the baronet unfastened the band that secured them. He took one of these documents up in sheer absence of mind, and opened it.
It was the letter written by the wretched girl who drowned herself in the Seine—the letter of Reginald Eversleigh's victim—the very letter on the evidence of which Sir Oswald had decided that his nephew was no fitting heir to a great fortune.
The baronet's brow contracted as he read.
"And it is to the man who could abandon a wretched woman to despair and death, that I am about to leave wealth and power," he exclaimed. "No; the decision which I arrived at in Arlington Street was a just and wise decision. I have been mad to-day—maddened by anger and despair; but it is not too late to repent my folly. The seducer of Mary Goodwin shall never be the master of Raynham Castle."
Sir Oswald folded the sheet of foolscap on which the will was written, and held it over the flame of the lamp. He carried it over to the fire-place, and threw it blazing on the empty hearth. He watched it thoughtfully until the greater part of the paper was consumed by the flame, and then went back to his seat.
"My nephews, Lionel and Douglas Dale, shall divide the estate between them," he thought. "I will send for my solicitor to-morrow, and make a new will."
* * * * *