“Only.”
“And only to so much of that as I leave?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you call it entail?”
The lawyer’s heart sank.
“Under our laws,” he explained, “the bequest could go no farther. The old English law of entail is broken here. You can doubly devise but you cannot do more. The law says that the dead hand shall not——”
Keturah reflected, her severe eyes looking at and through the man. She could question him freely whether he saw the drift of her questions or not. She had a moderate contempt for Horace Hollaby, as she had for most men, a contempt based on her dealings with them in which she invariably came out best. The justice had one virtue, however, that Keturah considered rare in males. There were things he heard, things he knew, and things he guessed, about which he never talked. On certain matters she had never been able to bully a word out of him. And whatever she told him would be kept in the back of his head.
“My brother,” she said, her face almost expressionless, “has, or had, a wife and child. Are they presumed to be legally dead?”
Judge Hollaby told her they were not.
“In any case, my sister-in-law could not come into any of the property?”