"Oh, I am so glad you've come!" Nannie said. She made a helpless gesture. "Elizabeth, what shall I do with everything?"
Elizabeth shook her head; the question which she had hurried down here to ask paused before such forlorn preoccupation.
"Of course her dresses Harris will give away—"
"Oh no!" Elizabeth interrupted, shrinking. "Don't give them to a servant."
"But," poor Nannie protested, "they are so dreadful, Elizabeth. Nobody can possibly wear them, except people like some of Harris's friends. But things like these—what would you do with these?" She held out a discolored pasteboard box broken at the corners and with no lid; a pair of onyx earrings lay in the faded blue cotton. "I never saw her wear them but once, and they are so ugly," Nannie mourned.
"Nannie," Elizabeth said, "I want to ask you something. That certificate Mrs. Maitland gave Blair: what made her give it to him?"
Nannie put the pasteboard box back in the drawer and turned sharply to face her sister-in-law, who was sitting on the edge of Mrs. Maitland's narrow iron bed; the scared attention of her eyes banished their vagueness. "What made her give it to him? Why, love, of course! Don't you suppose Mamma loved Blair better than anybody in the world, even if he did—displease her?"
"Uncle thinks you may have influenced her to give it to him."
"I did not!"
"Did you suggest it to her, Nannie?"