“But you’ll come some day, soon, won’t you, Bob?” Bertha exclaimed. “I hear you are very wicked, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes,” said Vickers, “I myself understand that I am an excellent subject for reform.”
“We won’t try and reform you,” they answered; “we like you as you are,” and they kissed him again, and departed.
On his return to the house he heard that Nellie had gone to lie down, leaving word that Mr. Overton was coming after lunch. Overton had been Mr. Lee’s man of business. He and Emmons arrived soon after two. They sat round the library stiffly. Only Overton seemed to be as usual, his calm Yankee face untouched by the constraint visible in the others.
“I don’t know whether you want me actually to read the will itself,” he said. “It is a very simple one. He leaves all the Hilltop property to his son, without restrictions of any kind. That is all he had to leave. The town house is nominally Nellie’s, but it is mortgaged to its full value.”
“Do you mean to say,” Emmons cried, “that Nellie gets nothing?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry to say—perhaps a hundred or so, but I doubt even that.”
“You mean that Mr. Lee did not even leave her the equivalent of the sum which his son took from her?”
“That is exactly what I mean, Mr. Emmons.”
“It is an iniquitous will. The man who made that will was mad, and no lawyer should have drawn it for him.”