The mother was not heartless. "You are doing this to help your father,
Doris. I know all about it. It is—it is noble of you!"
The girl looked at her, and the question rushed to her lips—"Oh, why have you, his wife, never done anything to help him?" But it remained unuttered. "Good-night, mother," she said, and hastened to the refuge of her room.
She wrote a few lines to Teddy, stating simply what she had done. After that she gave way.
* * * * *
About the same hour, in Dr. Handyside's study, four hundred miles away, a conference of three people was drawing to a close. Earlier in the day Caw had received a belated visit from Mr. Harvie, the Glasgow lawyer, who, owing to illness, had been unable to attend to business since his client's death. Beyond the information that Caw had been left the sum of £5,000 free of duty, the old housekeeper an annuity, and the doctor £1,000, Mr. Harvie had little to say. The rest of his late client's fortune, the house and its contents, were already Alan's—if the young man were still alive, and Mr. Harvie, whatever his own ideas might be, was under an obligation to assume as much until—a slight grimace of disapproval—"the clock stopped." "I have other instructions," he added, "but they are not to be acted on at present." He had returned to town by the last steamer.
"So we have come back to where we started," Dr. Handyside was saying. "The sum total of our discoveries is that we can do next to nothing. If I hadn't become so intimate with your master's character—not his affairs, you understand, Caw—I should have had very little respect for his methods. As for his motives, they are no business of ours."
"If I may say so," returned Caw, who would have been happier standing at attention than sitting in Miss Handyside's company, "you take a lofty view of the matter, sir, and you put it in a nutshell when you say that his motives are none of our business. I am sorry to have brought you and Miss Handyside into the trouble—"
"I rather think I came in," observed Miss Handyside with a smile.
"Which is a fact, miss. And very welcome, too, if I may say so. Also, Mr.
Craig trusted you both."
"Wherefore it is up to us to trust his wisdom and respect his wishes," said Handyside. "The green box must remain where it is and take its chance."