"I hope you've finished dinner?" Julia Cavendish lay, like a queen in state, on the smoothed bed. To the eyes of James Wilberforce, puzzling their way here and there about the subdued light of the room, she looked almost herself again. "You didn't mind my sending for you?"
"Not in the very least. Isn't that what I came down for?" The solicitor, unpleasantly self-conscious of his own physical bulk, sat down awkwardly beside the weak form on the bed.
The invalid dismissed her nurse. She had intended to postpone Wilberforce's interview till the next morning, to work an hour or so. But her mind was in one of its peculiar turmoils. To any other listener, the tremor in her voice alone would have betrayed the importance, to her plans, of the forthcoming talk.
"I ought to have sent for your father, I suppose," she began. "Have you brought the will with you?"
"Yes. It's in my room. Shall I go and get it?"
"No. There's a copy on my desk. Do you mind handing it to me?"
Obeying, James Wilberforce asked: "Is there anything you want altered?"
"Well--no--not exactly. But tell me, suppose I did want to make certain alterations, would it be necessary for you to draw up an entirely new document, or would this one do?"
"If it was only a minor alteration," said Jimmy, quite unconscious of the thought at the back of his client's head, "we could execute a codicil."
"A codicil." She played with the word. "That's a kind of postscript, isn't it?"