"By and you will think differently," says Mona, believing he alludes to his surrender of the Rodney property "You will get over this disappointment."
"I shall,—when death claims me," replies he.
"Nay, now," says Mona, sweetly, "do not talk like that. It grieves me. When you have formed a purpose worth living for, the whole world will undergo a change for you. What is dark now will seem light then; and death will be an enemy, a thing to battle with, to fight with desperately until one's latest breath. In the meantime," nervously, "do be cautious about that horrid weapon: won't you, now?"
"You ask me no questions about last night," he says, suddenly; "and there is something I must say to you. Get rid of that fellow Ridgway, the under-gardener. It was he opened the library window for me. He is untrustworthy, and too fond of filthy lucre ever to come to good. I bribed him."
He is now speaking with some difficulty, and is looking, not at her, but at the pattern he is drawing on the soft loam at his feet.
"Bribed him?" says Mona, in an indescribable tone.
"Yes. I knew about the secret panel from Warden, old Elspeth's nephew, who alone, I think, knew of its existence. I was determined to get the will. It seemed to me," cries he, with sudden excitement, "no such great crime to do away with an unrighteous deed that took from an elder son (without just cause) his honest rights, to bestow them upon the younger. What had my father done? Nothing! His brother, by treachery and base subterfuge, supplanted him, and obtained his birthright, while he, my father, was cast out, disinherited, without a hearing."
His passion carries Mona along with it.
"It was unjust, no doubt; it sounds so," she says, faintly. Yet even as she speaks she closes her little slender fingers resolutely upon the parchment that shall restore happiness to Nicholas and dear pretty Dorothy.
"To return to Ridgway," says Paul Rodney, pulling himself up abruptly. "See him yourself, I beg of you, as a last favor, and dismiss him. Send him over to me: I will take him back with me to Australia and give him a fresh start in life. I owe him so much, as I was the first to tempt him into the wrong path; yet I doubt whether he would have kept straight even had he not met me. He is mauvais sujet all through."