"I have prepared the necessary documents. Listen now, while I read," and the woman's weary, puzzled eyes dwelt on the lawyer's grave face as he recited the testamentary clauses by which "Stella Ingersoll, otherwise known as Stella Carmac," left all her real and personal estate to "her daughter, Yvonne Ingersoll."
"Now we'll get witnesses, and remember that you sign your name Stella Ingersoll," said the lawyer, with a cheerful and businesslike air. "Mr. Tollemache will be one witness, my clerk another, and little Barbe Pitou a third; so you need not worry at all because of the change of signature."
Forthwith, in the presence of Lorry and Bennett's clerk, and the scared Barbe, Mrs. Carmac signed her name in a way that was strangely familiar, though she had not seen it written that way during two decades. A precisely similar will was executed in the name of "Stella Carmac."
Bennett had not erred in his judgment. The pneumonia developed a high temperature that night, and Yvonne's mother died without recovering consciousness. She was buried at Nizon. To silence gossip, and by her husband's emphatic wish, she was described on the monument erected to her memory and to that of Walter Carmac as "Stella, wife of the above-named Walter Carmac, and formerly known as Stella Ingersoll."
The lawyer's extraordinary haste and anxiety with regard to the two wills was explained after the funeral.
"I have always had reason to believe that the validity of the marriage might be questioned," he said, when he had drawn Ingersoll, Yvonne, and Tollemache into the privacy of the studio. "When Mr. Carmac executed the will which may now, under advice, be set aside, he caused two copies to be made with blank spaces for names and dates. A few days later he lodged a sealed envelope with me and another with his bankers, and each bore the superscription:
"'This document is to be kept always in its present condition, and never opened unless my wife's succession to my estate shall be disputed. In that event the document must be produced and acted on.'
"I broke the seal yesterday, soon after Mr. Ingersoll's telegram came to hand, and was not surprised to find a will, properly filled in, signed, and attested, leaving Carmac's estate to 'Stella Ingersoll, formerly wife of John Ingersoll, artist, at one time resident in the Rue Blanche, Paris,' and dated subsequently to that already in existence. So, you see, all these tragic happenings might have been averted. Rupert Fosdyke could never have touched a penny of his uncle's money beyond the provision made for him in both wills."
But a white-faced girl looked at her father, and their eyes met, and each knew that a Power not to be controlled by any human agency had brought about the horrors that had agitated their beloved village during that memorable month.