“But a very necessary one,” Allen reminded her. “The old fellow has considerable of this world’s goods and since he can’t hope to take them with him where he’s going, it’s only sensible to dispose of them justly before he goes.”
“Oh,” said Betty, pityingly. “Is he dying, Allen?”
The young lawyer nodded soberly.
“And his dying isn’t the most pitiful thing about it,” he said. “Everybody has to make up his mind to die sometime and he has lived longer than most. But what worries me,” he paused and the frown deepened, “is that he has something on his mind that, it seems, he can’t bring himself to confide to anybody. Even the will that he drew up to-day isn’t final—or at least, I judged that it wasn’t by the fact that he told me to come back to-morrow.”
“You think he wants to change his will?” asked Betty, puzzled. “I wonder why.”
“If I knew that,” said Allen, with a sudden smile, “I’d know everything, most likely. The other day when he was out of his head—but there,” he checked himself, drawing himself up short as though he were about to say too much, “I can’t betray the confidence of a client. Not that he’s given me his confidence to any marked extent,” he finished with a rueful smile.
Betty was quiet for a moment, thinking over what he had said. She knew Allen well enough to be sure that he had not told her everything he knew. That, as he said, would be to betray the confidence of a client.
There was something very pathetic in the thought of the aged man dying with something on his conscience, a misdeed possibly, perhaps an injustice to some innocent person, and unable even in his extremity, poor stubborn old fellow, to confess.
“Suppose, Allen—” she said suddenly. “Suppose he dies without making a confession?”
Allen shrugged his shoulders.