The lawyer made a silent gesture, spreading his hands like a stage Frenchman, half dismay, half tacit protest.
“Better have a new document, eh?” The outraged parent had been already dismissed; the highly competent man of affairs was now in control. “My second girl, Ethel, Mrs. Doctor Cockburn, can have it all now, except”—Josiah hesitated an instant—“except five thousand pounds I shall leave to Gertrude Preston.”
Lawyer Mossop was still silent. But the mobile lips were working curiously. “Not for me to advise,” he said at last, very slowly, with much hesitation, “but if I might——”
Josiah cut him short with a stern lift of the hand.
“I know what you’re going to say, but if she was your gel what’d you do, eh?”
Lawyer Mossop rubbed his cheek perplexedly. “At bottom I might be rather proud of her.”
“You—might—be—rather—proud—of—her!” It was the tone of Alderman Munt J.P. to a particularly unsatisfactory witness at a morning session at the City Hall. An obvious lie, yet a white one because it was used for a moral purpose. Mossop had no ax to grind; he merely wanted to soften things a bit for a client and neighbor. “You can’t tell me, Mossop, you really think that.”
The solicitor gazed steadily past the purple face of his client through the open window to the riot of color beyond. “Why not?” he said. “Think of the pluck required to do a thing like that.”
Josiah shook his head angrily. “It’s the devil that’s in her.” He spoke with absolute conviction. “And it’s always been there. When she was that high”—he made an indication with his hand—“I’ve fair lammoxed her, but I could never turn her an inch. If she wanted to do a thing she‘d do it—and if she didn’t nothing would make her.”