“I regard myself as engaged to her.”
“Yet you do not love her. Not as I do,” I hastened to add. “She is my past, my present and my future; she is my whole life. Otherwise my conduct would be inexcusable. There is no reason why I should take precedence of you in other ways than that.”
He was taken aback. He had not expected any such an avowal from me. I had kept my secret well. It had not escaped the father’s eye but it had that of the lukewarm lover.
“You have some excuse for your presumption,” he admitted at last. “There has been no public recognition of our intentions, nor have we made any display of our affection. But you know it now, and must eliminate from your program that hope which you say is your whole life. As for the rest, I might as well tell you, now as later, that nothing but the sight of the lost will, made out as you have the hardihood to declare, will ever convince me that Uncle, even in the throes of approaching dissolution, would so far forget the affection of years as to give into the hands of my betrothed wife for public destruction the will he had made while under the stress of that affection. The one we all saw reduced to ashes was the one in which your name figured the largest. That I shall always believe and act upon till you can show me in black and white the absolute proof that I have made a mistake.”
He spoke with an air of dignity and yet with an air of detachment also, not looking me in the eye. The sympathy I had felt for him in his unfortunate position left me and I became boldly critical of everything he said. In every matter in which we, creatures of an hour, are concerned, there are depths which are never fully sounded. The present one was not likely to prove an exception. But the time had not come for me to show any positive distrust, so I let him go, with what I tried to make a dispassionate parting.
“Neither of us wish to take advantage of the other. That is why we are both disposed to be frank. I shall stand on my rights, too, Edgar, if events prove that I am legally entitled to them. You cannot expect me to do otherwise. I am a man like yourself and I love Orpha.”
Like a flash he wheeled at that and came hastily back.
“Do you mean that according to your ideas she goes absolutely with the fortune, in these days of woman’s independence? You will have to change your ideas. Uncle would never bind her to his wishes like that.”
He spoke with a conviction not observable in anything he had said before. He was not surmising now but speaking from what looked very much like knowledge.
“Then you saw those two wills—read them—became acquainted with their contents before I knew of their existence?”