Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DTTNCAN AND SOMERS Duncan And Somers had for several generations been the leading solicitors in Merchester; but now the firm was represented by Mr. Reginald Duncan, as the Somers of the present day was an old man of over eighty, and the grandson who was eventually to succeed to his share in the concern—young Alan Wylie—had not as yet emerged from the chrysalis of articled clerkship. Therefore the business was carried on for the present by Reginald Duncan and his head clerk, Mr. Sprott. Mr. Sprott had entered the service of Duncan and Somers as an office-boy fifty years before, and had remained in that office ever since, having " slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent" until he was now Mr. Duncan's right-hand man. Reginald Duncan was a distinguished-looking man of about fifty-five. He was both gifted and cultured, and his wide experience had not left him much to learn about human nature and its manifold frailties. He was a bachelor, and seemed likely to remain so, although he had had his romance like the rest of us, the said romance being Charlotte Fallowfield. When first Charlotte sought her father's distant cousin and put her business affairs into his hands, Reginald fell in love with her as single-heartedly andcompletely as if she had not had a penny in the world. But he was not as ready to inform her of the fact as he would have been in those circumstances, and hence arose the crowning mistake of his otherwise prosperous and sensible career. He was too proud to make love to a woman with such an enormous fortune as Charlotte Fallowfield's, and so offered up her happiness and his own upon the altar of his pride. For Charlotte and he were thoroughly suited to each other, and would have been unusually qualified to make one another happy; but be...