The old man took his glasses off again and looked at her, wondering much what stuff she was made of. Whatever it was he was sure she was as modest, and pure, and innocent as a new-born child, and he answered her:
“I’ve no doubt of it. I would if I were in his place.”
“And if he does, he can live right along here as if there had been no will?” was her next question; and the lawyer replied:
“Yes, just as if there had been no will;” then, remembering he had an engagement with a client and that it was already past the hour, he arose to go, and Rosamond was left alone.
It was not her nature to put off anything she had to do, and feeling that she should never rest until something definite was settled, she inquired at once where Everard was, and finding that he was in his father’s room, started thither immediately. He was sitting in his father’s chair by the table, arranging and sorting some papers and letters, but he arose when she came in and asked what he could do for her.
“I have been talking with Lawyer Russell,” she said, “trying to fix it some way, and he says I cannot give it to you till I am twenty-one; then I can do as I please, but it is so long to wait,—five years and a-half. I am most fifteen and a-half now. (This in parenthesis, as if to convince him of her mature age, preparatory to what was to follow.) I want you to have the money so much, for it is yours, no matter what the law may say. I do not like the law, and there is but one way out of it,—the trouble, I mean. Lawyer Russell says if you marry me, you can use the money just the same. Will you, Mr. Everard? I am fifteen and a-half.”
This she reiterated to strengthen her cause, looking him straight in the face all the time, without the slightest change of color or sign of self-consciousness.
Had she proposed in serious earnestness to murder him Everard could not have been more startled, or stared at her more fixedly than he did, as if to see what manner of girl this was, asking him to marry her as coolly and in as matter-of-fact a way as she would have asked the most ordinary favor. Was she crazy? Had the trouble about the will actually affected her brain! He thought so, and said to her very gently, as he would have spoken to a child or a lunatic:
“You are talking wildly, Rossie. You do not understand what you are saying. You are tired and excited. You must rest, and never on any account let any one know what you have said to me.”
“I do know what I am saying, and I am neither tired nor excited,” Rossie answered. “Lawyer Russell said that was the only way you could use the money before I was twenty-one.”