"The wretched cad!" said George Singleton, emphatically. "As if anything that a woman could do to a man would justify him in such cowardly retaliation! I am glad you told me this. I will end my association with him as soon as may be, and let him know at the same time my opinion of him—and of Miss Lynde."
"Do be cautious, George. I shall be sorry I told you the story if you go out of your way to insult the man in consequence. No doubt he was badly used."
The other laughed scornfully. "As if that would excuse him! But I don't believe a word of it. That girl is too proud ever to have taken the trouble to use him badly. But a man might lose his head just by looking at her. What a beauty she is!"
CHAPTER XXVII.
"And now the question is—what am I to do?" It was Marion who asked herself this, after the departure of the lawyer, who, with some remonstrance, had taken her instructions for drawing up the necessary papers to transfer to George Singleton his father's fortune. It was not with regard to the act itself that the lawyer remonstrated—that he thought just and wise enough,—but with regard to the sum which the heiress of the whole announced her intention of retaining.
"You might just as well keep fifty or a hundred thousand dollars," he declared. "Mr. Singleton is willing to relinquish even so much as half of the fortune; and it is absolute folly—if you will excuse me—for you to throw away a comfortable independence, and retain only a sum which is paltry in comparison to the amount of the fortune, and to your needs of life."
"You must allow me to be the best judge of that," Marion replied, firmly.
And, as she held inflexibly to her resolution, the lawyer finally went away with the same baffled feeling that the Singleton cousins had experienced. "What fools women are when it comes to the practical concerns of life!" he said, from the depths of his masculine scorn. "They are always in one extreme or the other. Here is this girl, who, from what I hear, must have been willing to do anything to secure the fortune, now throws it away for a whim without reason!"
Meanwhile Marion, left face to face, as it were, with her accomplished resolve, said to herself, "What am I to do now?"