Silence.
"Answer me, Nannie."
She looked at him with wild eyes, but she said nothing. Mr. Ferguson put his hand on her shoulder. "Nannie," he said, quietly, "Blair signed it; Blair wrote his mother's name."
"No! No! No! He did not! He did not." There was something in her voice—a sort of relief, a sort of triumph, even, that the other two could not understand, but which made them know that she was speaking the truth. "He did not," Nannie said, in a whisper; "if you accuse him of that, I'll have to tell you; though very likely you won't understand. I did it. For Mamma."
"Did what?" Robert Ferguson gasped; "not—? You don't mean—? Nannie! you don't mean that you—" he stopped; his lips formed a word which he would not utter.
"Mamma wanted him to have the money. The day before she died she told me she was going to give him a present. That day, that last day, she told me to get the check. And she wrote his name on it. No one asked her to. Not Blair. Not I. I never thought of such a thing! I didn't even know there was a check. She wanted to do it. She wrote his name. And then—she got weak; she couldn't go on. She couldn't sign it. So I signed it for her…later. It was not wrong. It was right. It carried out her wish. I am glad I did it."
CHAPTER XXXII It was not a confession; it was a statement. In the next distressing hour, during which Robert Ferguson succeeded in drawing the facts from Blair's sister, there was not the slightest consciousness of wrong-doing. Over and over, with soft stubbornness, she asserted her conviction: "It was right to do it. Mamma wanted to give the money to Blair. But she couldn't write her name. So I wrote it for her. It was right to do it."
"Nannie," her old friend said, in despair, "don't you know what the law calls it, when one person imitates another person's handwriting for such a purpose."
"You can call it anything you want to," she said, passionately. "I call it carrying out Mamma's wishes. And I would do it over again this minute."
Robert Ferguson was speechless with dismay. To find rigidity in this meek mind, was as if, through layers of velvet, through fold on fold of yielding dullness that gave at the slightest touch, he had suddenly, at some deeper pressure, felt, under the velvet, granite!