"Tomorrow afternoon."
"Well, I'll arrange the papers to-night, and bring them to you to-morrow morning; they must be put in the desk secretly. Now, good-bye at present, and mind, I have your promise."
Patience nodded silently, and turned away with a calm but determined face, while Beaumont went away to carry out the details of his nefarious scheme.
"I have done all I could to resist temptation," she said to herself, bitterly, "I can do no more. If I do sin it is for my son's sake, not my own."
[CHAPTER XXV]
A DEXTEROUS ARRANGEMENT.
Attention to details makes a perfect whole.
When Mr. Beaumont arrived at "The House of Good Living" about six o'clock, he proposed first to have his dinner, and then to go in for a good night's work in arranging all the details of his scheme to place Reginald Blake in the possession of the Garsworth estate.
Though he had told Patience that he would not admit Reginald into his confidence in order to spare the moral nature of the young man, this was hardly the true reason, as, in the first place, he was afraid, from what he had seen of his son, that the young man would not consent to be a party to the swindle, and, in the second, he wished to keep the true facts of the case to himself, lest Reginald should prove difficult to deal with, in which case, by threatening to dispossess him of the estate, he could keep a firm hand over the unconscious victim of his scheme. Thus, by a little dexterous lying, he benefited in two ways, appearing kindly-disposed in the eyes of Patience, and yet keeping his own secret as a useful weapon in time of need.
As soon as he discovered the squire's secret, he foresaw that he would have to imitate the old man's penmanship in order to fill up the blank spaces in the document addressed by Garsworth to his supposed son, and therefore, having obtained a specimen of the dead man's handwriting he practised assiduously, in order to commit the forgery as dexterously as possible. This was to him a comparatively easy matter, as he had a pretty talent for imitating handwriting, which he had exercised before, though not in any fashion likely to bring him within reach of the law. Luckily, he had not to sign any name, as the squire had already attested his signature to the paper, and all he had to do was to fill up the blanks left in the body of the letter. It had evidently not been written very long, and, the ink not having faded, he had to make no preparation to imitate the colour, but merely allow the words he inserted to grow black like the rest of the contents of the document.