Seek and Find by Oliver Optic — Read

WITHOUT remorse, I glanced behind me at the wreck I had made of the window. I did not regard myself as responsible for any damage I had caused in breaking away from my persecutors. Not only Tom, but my uncle, was engaged in a conspiracy against me, in which they had been concerned from my early childhood. Indeed, I had already come to the conclusion that the cottage and grounds had been purchased with money which rightfully belonged to me.

Judging from the conversations to which I had listened, detached and indefinite as they were, I was satisfied that my uncle and his son intended to cheat me out of my birthright, and out of the inheritance my father had left for me. But this was nothing compared with the statement of my uncle that my mother was insane, and the fact that I was not permitted to know even where she was. I began to doubt whether she was insane, or had ever been. It was possible that my uncle, to obtain his brother's property, had confined her in a lunatic asylum on a mere pretence. My blood boiled with indignation as I thought of these things, and I did not wonder that my uncle could not sleep nights, that he was a misanthrope, and hated the sound of his own and of other people's voices.