"Will you come with me and speak to my mother?" she said. "She knows you are here, and she wants to say something about what has happened—something about that document which Pratt said he possessed."
Eldrick and Collingwood exchanged glances without speaking. They followed Nesta into her mother's sitting-room. And instead of the semi-invalid whom they had expected to find there, they saw a woman who had evidently regained not only her vivacity and her spirits but her sense of authority and her inclination to exercise it.
"I am sorry that you gentlemen should have been drawn into all this wretched business!" she exclaimed, as she pointed the two men to chairs. "Everything must seem very strange, and indeed have seemed so for some time. But I have been the victim of as bad a scoundrel as ever lived—I'm not going to be so hypocritical as to pretend that I'm sorry he's dead—I'm not! I only wish he'd met his proper fate—on the scaffold. I don't know what you may have heard, or gathered—my daughter herself, from what she tells me, has only the vaguest notions—but I wanted to tell you, Mr. Eldrick, and you, Mr. Collingwood—seeing that you're one a solicitor and the other a barrister, that Pratt invented a most abominable plot against me, which, of course, hasn't a word of truth in it, yet was so clever that——"
Eldrick suddenly raised his hand.
"Mrs. Mallathorpe!" he said quietly. "I think you had better let me speak before you go any further. Perhaps we—Mr. Collingwood and I—know more than you think. Don't trifle, Mrs. Mallathorpe, for your own and your daughter's sake! Tell the truth—and answer a plain question, which I assure you, is asked in your own interest. What have you done with John Mallathorpe's will?"
Collingwood, anxious for Nesta, was watching her closely, and now he saw her turn a startled and inquiring look on her mother, who, in her turn, dashed a surprised glance at Eldrick. But if Mrs. Mallathorpe was surprised, she was also indignant, or she simulated indignation, and she replied to the solicitor's question with a sharp retort.
"What do you mean?—John Mallathorpe's will!" she exclaimed. "What do I know of John Mallathorpe's will? There never was——"
"Mrs. Mallathorpe!" interrupted Eldrick. "Don't! I'm speaking in your interest, I tell you! There was a will! It was made on the morning of John Mallathorpe's death. It was found by Mr. Collingwood's late grandfather, Antony Bartle: when he died suddenly in my office, it fell into Pratt's hands. That is the document which Pratt held over you—and not an hour ago, Esther Mawson took it from Pratt, and she gave it to you. Again I ask you—what have you done with it?"
Mrs. Mallathorpe hesitated a moment. Then she suddenly faced Eldrick with a defiant look. "Let them—let everybody—do what they like!" she exclaimed. "It's burnt! I threw it in that fire as soon as I got it! And now——"
Nesta interrupted her mother.