"You would wish to hear the reading of the will?" Olivia said, interrogatively.
Paul Marchmont shrugged his shoulders, with a low, careless laugh; not an indecorous laugh,—nothing that this man did or said ever appeared ill-advised or out of place. The people who disliked him were compelled to acknowledge that they disliked him unreasonably, and very much on the Doctor-Fell principle; for it was impossible to take objection to either his manners or his actions.
"That important legal document can have very little interest for me, my dear Mrs. Marchmont," he said gaily. "John can have had nothing to leave me. I am too well acquainted with the terms of my grandfather's will to have any mercenary hopes in coming to Marchmont Towers."
He stopped, and looked at Olivia's impassible face.
"What on earth could have induced this woman to marry my cousin?" he thought. "John could have had very little to leave his widow."
He played with the ornaments at his watch-chain, looking reflectively at the fire for some moments.
"Miss Marchmont,—my cousin, Mary Marchmont, I should say,—bears her loss pretty well, I hope?"
Olivia shrugged her shoulders.
"I am sorry to say that my stepdaughter displays very little Christian resignation," she said.
And then a spirit within her arose and whispered, with a mocking voice, "What resignation do you show beneath your affliction,—you, who should be so good a Christian? How have you learned to school your rebellious heart?"