to confess himself beaten, and return to them for assistance of any
kind. He could never have enacted the part of the prodigal son. He
knew this in earlier days, when husks were for the most part all he
had to sustain him. But the mind requires not even the material
husk, it lives on better food than that, and in his case mind had
triumphed over body, and borne it triumphantly to a safe, if not as
yet to a victorious, goal.

Yet Wynter, the spendthrift, the erstwhile master of him who now
could be _his_ master, has died, leaving behind him a fortune. What
was the sum? He glances back to the sheet in his hand and verifies
his thought. Yes--eighty thousand pounds! A good fortune even in
these luxurious days. He has died worth £80,000, of which his
daughter is sole heiress!

Before the professor's eyes rises a vision of old Wynter. They used
to call him "old," those boys who attended his classes, though he
was as light-hearted as the best of them, and as handsome as a
dissipated Apollo. They had all loved him, if they had not revered
him, and, indeed, he had been generally regarded as a sort of living
and lasting joke amongst them.

Curzon, holding the letter in his hand, and bringing back to his
memory the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor,
remembers how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at
forty years of age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving
them all _planté là_ as it were, and declared his intention of
starting life anew and making a pile for himself in some new world.

Well! it had not been such a joke after all, if they had only