I must again express my pleasure at your so prompt acceptance of my poor offer.

Yours faithfully, John Urquhart.

He re-invoked the extraordinary incident which had led to his “prompt acceptance” of Mr. Urquhart’s “poor offer.”

He was now thirty-five and for ten years he had laboriously taught History at a small institution in the city of London, living peacefully under the despotic affection of his mother, with whom, when he was only a child of ten, he had left Dorsetshire, and along with Dorsetshire all the agitating memories of his dead father.