SISTER THERESA
There was further information I wished to obtain, and I did not blush to pluck it from Stoddard before I let him go that night. Olivia Gladys Armstrong lived in Cincinnati; her father was a wealthy physician at Walnut Hills. Stoddard knew the family, and I asked questions about them, their antecedents and place of residence that were not perhaps impertinent in view of the fact that I had never consciously set eyes on their daughter in my life. As I look back upon it now my information secured at that time, touching the history and social position of the Armstrongs of Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, seems excessive, but the curiosity which the Reverend Paul Stoddard satisfied with so little trouble to himself was of immediate interest and importance. As to the girl in gray I found him far more difficult. She was Marian Devereux; she was a niece of Sister Theresa; her home was in New York, with another aunt, her parents being dead; and she was a frequent visitor at St. Agatha’s.
The wayward Olivia and she were on excellent terms, and when it seemed wisest for that vivacious youngster to retire from school at the mid-year recess Miss Devereux had accompanied her home, ostensibly for a visit, but really to break the force of the blow. It was a pretty story, and enhanced my already high opinion of Miss Devereux, while at the same time I admired the unknown Olivia Gladys none the less.
When Stoddard left me I dug out of a drawer my copy of John Marshall Glenarm’s will and re-read it for the first time since Pickering gave it to me in New York. There was one provision to which I had not given a single thought, and when I had smoothed the thin type-written sheets upon the table in my room I read it over and over again, construing it in a new light with every reading.
Provided, further, that in the event of the marriage of said John Glenarm to the said Marian Devereux, or in the event of any promise or contract of marriage between said persons within five years from the date of said John Glenarm’s acceptance of the provisions of this will, the whole estate shall become the property absolutely of St. Agatha’s School at Annandale, Wabana County, Indiana, a corporation under the laws of said state.
“Bully for the old boy!” I muttered finally, folding the copy with something akin to reverence for my grandfather’s shrewdness in closing so many doors upon his heirs. It required no lawyer to interpret this paragraph. If I could not secure his estate by settling at Glenarm for a year I was not to gain it by marrying the alternative heir. Here, clearly, was not one of those situations so often contrived by novelists, in which the luckless heir presumptive, cut off without a cent, weds the pretty cousin who gets the fortune and they live happily together ever afterward. John Marshall Glenarm had explicitly provided against any such frustration of his plans.
“Bully for you, John Marshall Glenarm!” I rose and bowed low to his photograph.
On top of my mail next morning lay a small envelope, unstamped, and addressed to me in a free running hand.
“Ferguson left it,” explained Bates.
I opened and read: