She sighed, and her soft eyes filled. "But you don't know how he talked. Oh, I can't help thinking it must be my fault! If he had had another kind of a mother, if his own mother had lived—"
"Own grandmother!" said Robert Ferguson, disgustedly; "the only trouble with you as a mother, is that you've been too good to the cub. If you'd knocked his head against the wall once or twice, you'd have made a man of him. My dear, you really must not be a goose, you know. It's the one thing I can't stand. Helena," he interrupted himself, chuckling, "you will be pleased to know that Cherry-pie (begging her pardon!) thinks that David will ultimately console himself by falling in love with Nannie! 'It would be very nice,' she says."
They both laughed, then David's mother sighed: "But just think how delightful to feel that life is as simple as that," she said.
Robert Ferguson picked a grape, and took careful aim at a pigeon; "Helena," he said, in a low voice, "before you see Nannie, perhaps I ought to tell you something. I wouldn't, only I know she will, and you ought to understand it. Can you keep a secret?"
"I can," Mrs. Richie said briefly.
"I believe it," he said, with a sudden dryness. Then he told her the story of the certificate.
"What! Nannie forged? Nannie!"
"We don't use that word; it isn't pretty. But that's what it amounts to, of course. And that's where David's money went."
"I suppose Mrs. Maitland changed her mind at the last," Mrs. Richie said; "well, I'm glad she did. It would have been too cruel if she hadn't given something to Blair."
"I don't think she did," he declared; "changing her mind wasn't her style; she wasn't one of your weak womanish creatures. She wouldn't have said she was coming to live in Mercer, and then tried to back out of it! No, she simply wrote Blair's name by mistake. Her mind wandered constantly in those last days. And seeing what she had done, she didn't indorse it."