"I my uncle's heir-at-law!" said Gerald, with a little laugh. "How can that be, my dear Miss Bellamy? You seem to forget that my uncle had a daughter."

"Your uncle had no daughter."

Gerald sat speechless for several seconds. "If my cousin Eleanor is dead, I certainly never heard of it."

"You never had a cousin Eleanor."

"My dear Miss Bellamy," said Gerald, "will you kindly run a pin into my arm, so that I may make sure I am not dreaming."

"You are not dreaming, Gerald Warburton. The young lady you have hitherto believed to be your cousin, is no relation whatever to you, neither was she any relation to your uncle, Jacob Lloyd. She was simply his adopted daughter."

After hearing this startling news, Gerald's silence was not to be wondered at. He woke up like a man rousing himself from a dream.

"You have all along known what you have just told me, Miss Bellamy?"

"Yes, I have known it all along. But to no one else was the secret ever imparted by your uncle and aunt. Eleanor was adopted by them when she was quite a little thing, and when they were living in a town more than two hundred miles away from Pembridge. For certain reasons they gave her their own name. She never knew, she does not know now, that they were not really her parents. She loved them as such, and they could not have thought more tenderly of her had she been that which the world believed her to be. But Jacob Lloyd was not only a kind-hearted man: he was a just one. He shrank from revealing the truth to Eleanor while he was alive, but it was imperatively necessary, for certain reasons which I may one day explain to you, that she should become cognisant of everything after his death. Hence the sealed packet: which contains a duly authenticated statement of these facts."

"You take my breath away! There is nothing in the 'Arabian Nights' half so exciting," exclaimed Gerald.