But before any harm could happen to Launcelot Darrell, Eleanor clung about her husband’s upraised arm.
“What you said just now was the truth, Gilbert,” she cried; “he is not worthy of it; he is not indeed. He is beneath an honest man’s anger. Let him alone; for my sake let him alone. Retribution must come upon him, sooner or later. I thought it had come to-night, but there has been witchcraft in all this business. I can’t understand it.”
“Stay, Eleanor,” said Gilbert Monckton, putting down his cane, and turning away from Launcelot Darrell as he might have turned from a mongrel cur that he had been dissuaded from punishing: “This last will—what was the wording of it—to whom did it leave the fortune?”
Launcelot Darrell looked up eagerly, breathlessly waiting for Eleanor’s answer.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What, have you forgotten?”
“No, I never knew anything about the contents of the will. I had no opportunity of looking at it. I took it from the chair on which Launcelot Darrell threw it, and put it in my pocket. From that moment to this I have never seen it.”
“How do you know, then, that it was a will?” asked Gilbert Monckton.
“Because I heard Launcelot Darrell and his companion speak of it as the genuine will.”
The young man seemed infinitely relieved by the knowledge of Eleanor’s ignorance.