“Not without its looking very queer to her husband.” Mr. Shaw moved toward the office door. “I guess I wouldn’t worry about the matter, Ogden, if I were you. Let them fight it out themselves. After all, it’s their funeral, not ours, you know. If there is anything I can do in the matter, let me know. Good-night. I’ve got to hurry.” He passed out, the expression on his face indicating a sort of morose satisfaction. Perhaps he was congratulating himself upon the fact that he was not married.
Mr. Brennan put the will into his pocket, called in his stenographer, and spent half an hour in clearing his desk for the night. He tried to dismiss the matter of the will from his mind as he rode up-town in the subway, but it persisted with annoying regularity, and prevented his usual enjoyment of his evening paper. He was a man whose gaunt and forbidding exterior masked a nature innately kind, and he deeply regretted the circumstances that forced him to play the part in the affairs of the Rogers’ family which now confronted him. The more he thought of the matter, the more difficult it became to evolve any course of action that would obviate the apparently inevitable crash. The law required that he, as executor of West’s estate, should turn over all the property to Mrs. Rogers, and that duty he could in no way evade. His conscience told him that to do so in such a way as to hoodwink or deceive her husband would be wrong, and yet he hesitated to put the matter in a light that would result in a complete disruption of the Rogers’ domestic affairs. It spoiled his enjoyment of his dinner, which, being a bachelor, he ate at his club, and it clung to him like a cloak of gloom all the way up to the Roxborough. It was close to half-past eight when he entered the vestibule of the apartment house, and, after inquiring whether Mrs. Rogers was in, sent up his card by the elevator boy.
CHAPTER XI
Mrs. Pope did not often spend an evening at her son-in-law’s. She lived some distance down-town, at a boarding-house kept by an old acquaintance of hers, on Fifty-ninth Street, and she had an aversion to the trip to Harlem. She often told the girls that New York stopped at Fifty-ninth Street and that she could never endure living beyond it.
Her object, on this particular occasion, was to induce Donald, if possible, to change his mind with reference to the seashore cottage which she was so anxious to take for the summer.
She came in puffing audibly, accompanied by Alice. Her usual dissatisfied expression was in evidence. Mrs. Pope was chronically dissatisfied with everything—her income, her life, her increasing flesh, her daughter’s marriage, and the weather.
“Edith,” she announced, as she entered the room, “the elevator service in this place gets worse every day. I’ve been waiting downstairs for a car for over five minutes, and the boy had the impertinence to tell me he had been out running errands for one of the tenants. You ought to complain about it.”
“I’m sorry, mother,” said Edith, as she helped in the removal of Mrs. Pope’s coat.