When Nannie Maitland, trembling very much, pressed into her brother's hand that certificate for what was, in those days, a very considerable fortune, Blair had been deeply moved. It came after a night, not of grief, to be sure, but of what might be called cosmic emotion,—the child's realization of the parent's death. When he saw the certificate, and knew that at the last moment his mother's ruthless purpose had flagged, her iron will had bent, a wave of something like tenderness rose above his hate as the tide rises above wrecking rocks. For a moment he thought that even if she had carried out her threat of disinheriting him he would be able to forgive her. But as inevitably the wave of feeling ebbed, and he saw again those black rocks of hate below the moving brightness of the tide, he reminded himself that this gift of hers was only a small part of what belonged to him. In a way it was even a confession that she had wronged him. She had written his name, Nannie told him with a curious tremor in her hands and face, "just at the last. It was that last morning," Nannie said, huskily, trying to keep her voice steady; "she hadn't time to change her will, but this shows she was sorry she made it."

"I don't know that that follows," Blair said, gravely. It was not until the next day that he referred to it again: "After all, Nannie, if her will is what she said it would be, it is—outrageous, you know. This money doesn't alter that."

Yet somehow, in those days before the funeral, whenever he thought of breaking the will, that relenting gift seemed to stay his hand. The idea of using her money to thwart her purpose, of taking what she had given him, from affection and a tardy sense of justice, to insult her memory, made him uncomfortable to the point of irritability. It was esthetically offensive. Once he sounded Elizabeth on the subject, and her agreeing outcry of disgust drove him into defending himself: "Of course we don't know yet what her will is; but if she has done what she threatened, it is abominable; and I'll break it—"

"With the money she gave you?" she said.

And he said, boldly, "Yes!"

But he was not really bold; he was perplexed and unhappy, for his hope that his mother had not disinherited him was based on something a little finer than his wish to come into his own; it was a real reluctance to do violence to a relationship of which he had first become conscious the night she died. But with that reluctance, was also the instinct of self-defense: "I have a right to her money!"

The day after the funeral he went to Mrs. Maitland's lawyers with a request to see the will.

"Certainly," the senior member of the firm said; "as you are a legatee a copy has already been prepared for you. I regret, Blair, that your mother took the course she did. I cannot help saying to you that we ventured to advise against it.

"I was aware of my mother's purpose," Blair said, briefly; and added, to himself, "she has done it! … I shall probably contest the will," he said aloud.

Sarah Maitland's old friend and adviser looked at him sympathetically.
"No use, my boy; it's cast-iron. That was her own phrase, 'cast-iron.'"
Then, really sorry for him, he left him in the inner office so that he
might read that ruthless document alone.

Mrs. Maitland had said it was a pity she could not live to see Blair fight her will; she "would like the fun of it." She would not have found any food for mirth if she could have seen her son in that law-office reading with set teeth, her opinion of himself, her realization of her responsibility in making him what he was, and her reason for leaving him merely a small income from a trust fund. Had it not been for the certificate—in itself a denial of her cruel words—lying at that moment in his breast pocket, he would have been unable to control his fury. As it was, underneath his anger was the consciousness that she had made what reparation she could.

When he folded the copy of the will and thrust it into his pocket his face was very pale, but he could not resist saying to old Mr. Howe as he passed him in the outer office, "I hope you will be pleased, sir, in view of your protest about this will, to know that my mother regretted her course toward me, and left a message to that effect with my sister."

"I am glad to hear it," the astonished lawyer said, "but—"

Blair did not wait to hear the end of his sentence. He said to himself that even before he made up his mind what to do about the will he must get possession of his money—"or the first thing I know some of their confounded legal quibbles will make trouble for me," he said.

Certainly there was no trouble for him as yet; the process of securing his mother's gift involved nothing more than the depositing of the certificate in his own bank. The cashier, who knew Sarah Maitland's name very well indeed on checks payable to her son, ventured to offer his condolences: "Your late mother was a very wonderful woman, Mr. Maitland. There was no better business man this side of the Alleghanies than your mother, sir."

Blair bowed; he was too absorbed to make any conventional reply. The will: should he or should he not contest it? His habit of indecision made the mere question—apart from its gravity—acutely painful; not even the probabilities of the result of such a contest helped him to decide what to do. The probabilities were grimly clear. Blair had, perhaps, a little less legal knowledge than the average layman, but even he could not fail to realize that Sarah Maitland's will was, as Mr. Howe had said, "iron." Even if it could be broken, it might take years of litigation to do it. "And a 'bird in the hand'!" Blair reminded himself cynically. "But," he told Nannie, a week or two later when she was repeating nervously, for the twentieth time, just how his mother had softened toward him,—"but those confounded orphan asylums make me mad! If she wanted orphans, what about you and me? Charity begins at home. I swear I'll contest the will!"

Nannie did not smile; she very rarely smiled now. Miss White thought she was grieving over her stepmother's death; and Elizabeth said, pityingly, "I didn't realize she was so fond of her." Perhaps Nannie did not realize it herself until she began to miss her stepmother's roughness, her arrogant generosity, her temper,—to miss, even, the mere violence of her presence; then she began to grieve softly to herself. "Oh, Mamma, I wish you hadn't died," she used to say, over and over, as she lay awake in the darkness. She lay awake a great deal in those first weeks.

All her life Nannie had been like a little leaf whirled along by a great gale of thundering power and purpose which she never attempted to understand, much less contend with; now, abruptly, the gale had dropped, and all her world was still. No wonder she lay awake at night to listen to such stillness! Apart from grief the mere shock of sudden quietness might account for her nervousness, Robert Ferguson said; but he was perplexed at her lack of interest in her own affairs. She seemed utterly unaware of the change in her circumstances. That she was a rich woman now was a matter of indifference to her. And she seemed equally unconscious of her freedom. Apparently it never occurred to her that she could alter her mode of life. Except that, at Blair's insistence, she had a maid, and that Harris had cleared the office paraphernalia from the dining-room table, life in the stately, dirty, melancholy old house still ran in those iron grooves which Mrs. Maitland had laid down for herself nearly thirty years before. Nannie knew nothing better than the grooves, and seemed to desire nothing better. She was indifferent to her surroundings, and what was more remarkable, indifferent to Blair's perplexities; at any rate, she was of no assistance to him in making up his mind about the will. His vacillations hardly seemed to interest her. Once he said, suppose instead of contesting it, he should go to work? But she only said, vaguely, "That would be very nice."

Curiously enough, in the midst of his uncertainties, a little certainty had sprung up: it was the realization that work, merely as work, might be amusing. In these months of tormenting jealousy, of continually crushed hope that Elizabeth would begin to care for him, of occasional shamed consciousness of having taken advantage of a woman—Blair Maitland had had very little to amuse him. So, in those hesitating weeks that followed his mother's death, work, which her will necessitated, began to interest him. Perhaps the interest, if not the amusement, was enhanced by one or two legal opinions as to the possibility of breaking the will. Harry Knight read it, and grinned:

"Well, old man, as you wouldn't give me the case anyhow, I can afford to be perfectly disinterested and tell you the truth. In my opinion, it would put a lot of cash into some lawyer's pocket to contest this will; but I bet it would take a lot out of yours! You'd come out the small end of the horn, my boy."

But Knight was young, Blair reflected, and perhaps his opinion wasn't worth anything. "He's 'Goose Molly's' son," he said to himself, with a half-laugh; it was strange how easily he fell into his mother's speech sometimes! With a distrust of Harry Knight's youth as keen as her own might have been, Blair stated his case to a lawyer in another city.

"Before reading the will," said this gentleman, "let me inquire, sir, whether there is any doubt in your mind of your mother's mental capacity at the time the instrument was drawn?"

"My mother was Sarah Maitland, of the Maitland Works," said Blair, briefly; and the lawyer's involuntary exclamation of chagrin would have been laughable, if it had not been so significant. "But we should, of course, be glad to represent you, Mr. Maitland," he said. Blair, remembering Harry Knight's disinterested remark about pockets, said, dryly, "Thanks, very much," and took his departure. "He must think I'm Mr. Doestick's friend," he told himself. The old joke was his mother's way of avoiding an emphatic adjective when she especially felt the need of it; but he had forgotten that she had ever used it.

As he walked from the lawyer's office to his hotel, he was absorbed to the point of fatigue in his effort to make up his mind, but it was characteristic of him that even in his absorption he winced at the sight of a caged robin, sitting, moping on its perch, in front of a tobacconist's. He had passed the poor wild thing and walked a block, before he turned impulsively on his heel, and came back to interview the shopkeeper. "How much will you sell him for?" he said, with that charming manner that always made people eager to oblige him. The robin, looking at him with lack-luster eyes, sunk his poor little head down into his dulled feathers; there was something so familiar in the movement, that Blair cringed.

"I want to buy the little beggar," he said, so eagerly that the owner mentioned a preposterous price. Blair took the money out of his pocket, and the bird out of the cage. For a minute the captive hesitated, clinging with terrified claws to his rescuer's friendly finger. "Off with you, old fellow!" Blair said, tossing the bird up into the air; and the unused wings were spread! For a minute the eyes of the two men followed the joyous flight over the housetops; then the tobacconist grinned rather sheepishly: "Guess you've struck oil, ain't you?—or somebody's left you a fortune."

Blair chuckled. "Think so?" he said. But as he walked on down the street, he sighed; how dull the robin's eyes had been. Elizabeth's eyes looked like that sometimes. "What a donkey I am," he said to himself; "ten dollars! Well, I'll have to contest the will and get that fortune, or I can't keep up the liberator role!" Then he fell to thinking how he must invest what fortune he had—anything to get that confounded robin out of his head! "I'm not going to keep all my money in a stocking in the bank," he told himself. The idea of investment pleased him; and when he got back to Mercer he devoted himself to consultations with brokers. After some three months of it, he found the 'work,' as he called it, distinctly amusing. "It's mighty interesting," he told his wife once; "I really like it."

Elizabeth said, languidly, that she hoped he would go into business because it would have pleased his mother. Since Mrs. Maitland's death, Elizabeth had not seemed well; no one connected her languor with that speechless walk with David to Nannie's door, or her look into his eyes when she bade farewell to a hope that she had not known she was cherishing. But the experience had been a profound shock to her. His entire ease, his interest in other matters than the one matter of her life, and most of all his casual "glad to see you," meant that he had forgiven her, and so no longer loved her,—for of course, if he loved her he would not forgive her! In these two years she had told herself with perfect sincerity, a thousand times, that he had ceased to love her; but now it seemed to her that, for the first time, she really knew it. "He doesn't even hate me," she thought, bleakly. For sheer understanding of suffering she grew a little gentler to Blair; but her sympathy, although it gave him moments of hope, did not reach the point of helping him to decide what to do about the will. So, veering between the sobering reflection that litigation was probably useless, and the esthetically repulsive idea of using his mother's confession of regret to fight her, he reached no decision. Meantime, "investment" slipped easily into speculation,—speculation which, by that strange tempering of the wind that sometimes comes before the lamb is shorn, was remarkably successful.

It was gossip about this speculation that made Robert Ferguson prick up his ears: "Where in thunder does he get the money to monkey with the stock-market?" he said to himself; "he hasn't any securities to put up, and he can't borrow on his expectations any more,—everybody knows she cut him off with a shilling!" He was concerned as well as puzzled. "I'll have him on my hands yet," he thought, morosely. "Confound it! It's hard on me that she disinherited him. He'll be a millstone round my neck as long as he lives." Robert Ferguson had long ago made up his mind—with tenderness—that he must support Elizabeth, "but I won't supply that boy with money to gamble with! And if he goes on in this way, of course he'll come down on me for the butcher's bill." That was how he happened to ask Elizabeth about Blair's concerns. When he did, the whole matter came out. It was Sunday morning. Elizabeth, starting for church, had asked Blair, perfunctorily, if he were going. "Church?" he said—he was sitting at his writing-table, idly spinning a penny; "not I! I'm going to devote the Sabbath day to deciding about the will." She had made no comment, and his lip hardened. "She doesn't care what I do," he said to himself, gloomily; yet he believed she would be pleased if he refused to fight. "Heads or tails," he said, listening to her retreating step; "suppose I say 'heads, bird in the hand;—work. Tails, bird in the bush;—fight.' Might as well decide it this way if she won't help me."

She had never thought of helping him; instead she stopped at her uncle's and went out into the garden with him to watch him feed his pigeons. When that was over, they came back together to the library, and it was while she was standing at his big table buttoning her gloves that he asked her if Blair was speculating.

Yes; she believed he was. No; not with her money; that had been just about used up, anyhow; although he had paid it all back to her when he got his money. "Will you invest it for me, Uncle Robert?" she said.

"Of course; but mind," he barked, with the old, comfortable crossness, "you won't get any crazy ten per cent out of my investments! You'll have to go to Blair Maitland's wildcats for that. But if he isn't using your money, how on earth can he speculate? What do you mean by 'his' money?"

"Why," she explained, surprised, "he has all that money Mrs. Maitland gave him the day she died."

"What!"

"Didn't you know about the check?" she said; she had not mentioned it to him herself, partly because of their tacit avoidance of Blair's name, but also because she had taken it for granted that he was aware of what Mrs. Maitland had done. She told him of it now, adding, in a smothered voice, "She forgave him for marrying me, you see, at the end."

He was silent for a few moments, and Elizabeth, glancing at the clock, was turning to go, but he stopped her. "Hold on a minute. I don't understand this business. Tell me all about it, Elizabeth."

She told him what little she knew, rather vaguely: Mrs. Maitland had drawn a check—no: she believed it was called a bank certificate of deposit. It was for a great deal of money. When she told him how much, Robert Ferguson struck his fist on the arm of his chair. "That's it!" he said. "That is where David's money went!"

"David's money?" Elizabeth said, breathlessly.

"I see it now," he went on, angrily; "she had the money on hand; that's why she tried to write that letter. How Fate does get ahead of David every time!"

"Uncle! What do you mean?"

He told her, briefly, of Mrs. Maitland's plan. "She said two years ago that she was going to give David a lump sum. I didn't know she had got it salted down—she was pretty close-mouthed about some things; but I guess she had. Well, probably, at the last minute, she thought she had been hard on Blair, and decided to hand it over to him, instead of giving it to David. She had a right to, a perfect right to. But I don't understand it! The very day she spoke of writing to David, she told me she wouldn't leave Blair a cent. It isn't like her to whirl about that way—unless it was during one of those times when she wasn't herself. Well," he ended, sighing, "there is nothing to be done about it, of course; but I'll see Nannie, and get at the bottom of it, just for my own satisfaction."

Elizabeth's color came and went; she reminded herself that she must be fair to Blair; his mother had a right to show her forgiveness by leaving the money to him instead of David. Yes; she must remember that; she must be just to him. But even as she said so she ground her teeth together.

"Blair did not try to influence his mother, Uncle Robert," she said, "if that's what you are thinking of. He didn't see her while she was sick. He has never seen her since—since—" "There are other ways of influencing people than by seeing them. He wrote to Nannie, didn't he?"

"If I thought," Elizabeth said in a low voice, "that Blair had induced Nannie to influence Mrs. Maitland, I would—" But she did not finish her sentence. "Good-by, Uncle Robert. I'm going to see Nannie."

As she hurried down toward Shantytown through the Sunday emptiness of the hot streets, she said to herself that if Nannie had made her stepmother give the money to Blair, she, Elizabeth, would do something about it! "I won't have it!" she said, passionately.

It had been a long time since Elizabeth's face had been so vivid. The old sheet-lightning of anger began to flash faintly across it. She did not know what she would do to Nannie if Nannie had induced Mrs. Maitland to rob David, but she would do something! Yet when she reached the house, her purpose waited for a minute; Nannie's tremor of loneliness and perplexity was so pitifully in evidence that she could not burst into her own perplexity.

She had been trying, poor Nannie! to make up her mind about many small, crowding affairs incident to the situation. In these weeks since Mrs. Maitland's death, Nannie, for the first time in her life, found herself obliged to answer questions. Harris asked them: "You ain't a-goin' to be livin' here, Miss Nannie; 'tain't no use to fill the coal-cellar, is it?" Miss White asked them: "Your Mamma's clothes ought to be put in camphor, dear child, or else given away; which do you mean to do?" Blair asked them: "When will you move out of this terrible house, Nancy dear?" A dozen times a day she was asked to make up her mind, she whose mind had always been made up for her!

That hot Sunday morning when Elizabeth was hurrying down to Shantytown with the lightning flickering in her clouded eyes, Nannie, owing to Miss White's persistence about camphor, had gone into Mrs. Maitland's room to look over her things.

Oh, these "things"! These pitiful possessions that the helpless dead must needs leave to the shrinking disposal of those who are left! How well every mourner knows them, knows the ache of perplexity and dismay that comes with the very touch of them. It is not the valuables that make grief shrink,—they settle themselves; such-and-such books or jewels or pieces of silver belong obviously to this or that side of the family. But what about the dear, valueless, personal things that neither side of the family wants? Things treasured by the silent dead because of some association unknown, perhaps, to those who mourn. What about these precious, worthless things? Mrs. Maitland had no personal possessions of intrinsic value, but she had her treasures. There was a little calendar on her bureau; it was so old that Nannie could not remember when it had not been there hanging from the slender neck of a bottle of German cologne. She took it up now, and looked at the faded red crescents of the new moon; how long ago that moon had waxed and waned! "She loved it," Nannie said to herself, "because Blair gave it to her." Standing on the bureau was the row of his photographs; on each one his mother had written his age and the date when the picture had been taken. In the disorder of the top drawer, tumbled about among her coarse handkerchiefs, her collars, her Sunday black kid gloves, were relics of her son's babyhood: a little green morocco slipper, with a white china button on the ankle-band; a rubber rattle, cracked and crumbling…. What is one to do with things like these? Burn them, of course. There is nothing else that can be done. Yet the mourner shivers when the flame touches them, as though the cool fingers of the dead might feel the scorch! Poor, frightened Nannie was the last person who could light such a holy fire; she took them up—the slipper or the calendar, and put them down again. "Poor Mamma!" she said over and over. Then she saw a bunch of splinters tied together with one of Blair's old neckties; she held it in her hand for a minute before she realized that it was part of a broken cane. She did not know when or why it had been broken, but she knew it was Blair's, and her eyes smarted with tears. "Oh, how she loved him!" she thought, and drew a breath of satisfaction remembering how she had helped that speechless, dying love to express itself.

She was standing there before the open drawer, lifting things up, then putting them back again, unable to decide what to do with any of them, when Elizabeth suddenly burst in:

"Nannie!"

"Oh, I am so glad you've come!" Nannie said. She made a helpless gesture. "Elizabeth, what shall I do with everything?"

Elizabeth shook her head; the question which she had hurried down here to ask paused before such forlorn preoccupation.

"Of course her dresses Harris will give away—"

"Oh no!" Elizabeth interrupted, shrinking. "Don't give them to a servant."

"But," poor Nannie protested, "they are so dreadful, Elizabeth. Nobody can possibly wear them, except people like some of Harris's friends. But things like these—what would you do with these?" She held out a discolored pasteboard box broken at the corners and with no lid; a pair of onyx earrings lay in the faded blue cotton. "I never saw her wear them but once, and they are so ugly," Nannie mourned.

"Nannie," Elizabeth said, "I want to ask you something. That certificate Mrs. Maitland gave Blair: what made her give it to him?"

Nannie put the pasteboard box back in the drawer and turned sharply to face her sister-in-law, who was sitting on the edge of Mrs. Maitland's narrow iron bed; the scared attention of her eyes banished their vagueness. "What made her give it to him? Why, love, of course! Don't you suppose Mamma loved Blair better than anybody in the world, even if he did—displease her?"

"Uncle thinks you may have influenced her to give it to him."

"I did not!"

"Did you suggest it to her, Nannie?"

"I asked her once, while she was ill, wouldn't she please be nice to
Blair,—if you call that suggesting! As for the certificate, that last
morning she sort of woke up, and told me to bring it to her to sign.
And I did."

She turned back to the bureau, and put an unsteady hand down into the drawer. The color was rising in her face, and a muscle in her cheek twitched painfully.

"But Nannie," Elizabeth said, and paused; the dining-room door had opened, and Robert Ferguson was standing on the threshold of Mrs. Maitland's room looking in at the two girls. The astonishment he had felt in his talk with his niece had deepened into perplexity. "I guess I'll thresh this thing out now," he said to himself, and picked up his hat. He was hardly ten minutes behind Elizabeth in her walk down to the Maitland house.

"Nannie," he said, kindly,—he never barked at Nannie; "can you spare time, my dear, to tell me one or two things I want to know?" He had come in, and found a dusty wooden chair. "Go ahead with your sorting things out. You can answer my question in a minute; it's about that certificate your mother gave Blair."

Nannie had turned, and was standing with her hands behind her gripping the edge of the bureau; she gasped once or twice, and glanced first at one inquisitor and then at the other; her face whitened slowly. She was like some frightened creature at bay; indeed her agitation was so marked that Robert Ferguson's perplexity hardened into something like suspicion. "Can there be anything wrong?" he asked himself in consternation. "You see, Nannie," he explained, gently, "I happen to know that your mother meant it for David Richie, not Blair."

"If she did," said Nannie, "she changed her mind." "When did she change her mind?"

"I don't know. She just told me to bring the check to her to sign, that—that last morning."

"Was she perfectly clear mentally?"

"Yes. Yes. Of course she was! Perfectly clear."

"Did she say why she had changed her mind?"

"No," Nannie said, and suddenly fright and anger together made her fluent; "but why shouldn't she change her mind, Mr. Ferguson? Isn't Blair her son? Her only son! What was David to Mamma? Would you have her give all that money to an outsider, and leave her only son penniless? Perhaps she changed her mind that morning. I don't know anything about it. I don't see what difference it makes when she changed it, so long as she changed it. All I can tell you is that she told me to bring her the check, or certificate, or whatever you call it, out of the little safe. And I did, and she made it out to Blair. I didn't ask her to. I didn't even know she had it; but I am thankful she did it!"

Her eyes were dilating; she put her shaking hand up to her throat, as if she were struggling for breath. Her statement was perfectly reasonable and probable, yet it left no doubt in Robert Ferguson's mind that there was something wrong,—very wrong! Even Elizabeth could see it. They both had the same thought: Blair had in some way influenced, perhaps even coerced his mother. How, they could not imagine, but Nannie evidently knew. They looked at each other in dismay. Then Elizabeth sprang up and put her arms around her sister-in-law. "Oh, Uncle," she said, "don't ask her anything more now!" She felt the quiver through all the terrified little figure.

"Mamma wanted Blair to have the money; it's his! No one can take it from him!"

"Nobody wants to, Nannie, if it is his honestly," Robert Ferguson said, gravely.

"Honestly?" Nannie whispered, with dry lips.

"Nannie dear, tell us the truth," Elizabeth implored her; "Uncle won't be hard on Blair, if—if he has done wrong. I know he won't."

"Wrong?" said Nannie; "Blair done wrong?" She pushed Elizabeth's arms away; "Blair has never done wrong in his life!" She stood there, with her back against the bureau, and dared them. "I won't have you suspect my brother! Elizabeth! How can you let Mr. Ferguson suspect Blair?"

"Nannie," said Robert Ferguson, "was Blair with his mother when she signed that certificate?"

"No."

"Were you alone with her?"

Silence.

"Answer me, Nannie."

She looked at him with wild eyes, but she said nothing. Mr. Ferguson put his hand on her shoulder. "Nannie," he said, quietly, "Blair signed it; Blair wrote his mother's name."

"No! No! No! He did not! He did not." There was something in her voice—a sort of relief, a sort of triumph, even, that the other two could not understand, but which made them know that she was speaking the truth. "He did not," Nannie said, in a whisper; "if you accuse him of that, I'll have to tell you; though very likely you won't understand. I did it. For Mamma."

"Did what?" Robert Ferguson gasped; "not—? You don't mean—? Nannie! you don't mean that you—" he stopped; his lips formed a word which he would not utter.

"Mamma wanted him to have the money. The day before she died she told me she was going to give him a present. That day, that last day, she told me to get the check. And she wrote his name on it. No one asked her to. Not Blair. Not I. I never thought of such a thing! I didn't even know there was a check. She wanted to do it. She wrote his name. And then—she got weak; she couldn't go on. She couldn't sign it. So I signed it for her…later. It was not wrong. It was right. It carried out her wish. I am glad I did it."