“I beg your pardon?” queried the old man, curtly, as if he doubted his hearing.
“My income is pitifully small, Mr. Jevons—only four thousand a year, which my father allows me, and he makes a favor of that, often withholding it, and plunging me into debt.”
Mr. Jevons looked incredulous. “Four thousand a year. Did you see your mother’s will, Mrs. Swinton?”
“No. Did she make a will?”
“Yes, of course. I drew it up for her. You were 290 only a girl then, I remember. You were away in Europe, in a convent, were you not, when your mother died?”
“Yes, and father wouldn’t allow me to come home.”
“Under that will, your mother left you something more than twenty thousand a year.”
“Mr. Jevons, you are thinking of someone else. You have so many clients you are mixing them up. My father, who is little better than a miser, absorbed the whole of my mother’s income at her death.”
“Impossible! Impossible! Your mother left you considerably more than half-a-million dollars. It was because of a dispute over the sum that I withdrew from your father’s affairs. I was his lawyer once, you remember. A difficult man—a difficult man. You don’t mean to tell me that you have received from your father only four thousand a year? It’s incredible. It’s illegal.”
Mrs. Swinton laid her hand upon her heart, to still the throbbing set up by this startling turn of affairs.