“I mean—do you intend to break it?”
There was a long silence. Walter’s upper lip, in spite of his efforts to control it, was twitching nervously. At length he said: “He is gone. It is his will. It contains his—life ambition. I think it would be wrong not to respect it.” He looked at his brother appealingly.
“Then I must warn you that, unless you break it and divide everything equally among his heirs, I shall make a contest.”
“But you consented, Jim!” pleaded Walter, recovering from his stupor.
“Consented—to what?”
“To—to my staying—where I was.”
“While he lived. I said nothing about afterward. If you won’t break the will, I shall. It will be easy enough. I can prove he made it in the belief that I had forged his name. I can prove—that—I didn’t.”
“But you know, Jim, he heard the truth years before he died.”
James smiled cynically. “How do I know it?”
“I told you that mother told him on her death-bed.”