"Why?" asked Katherine, indifferently. She felt very hopeless.
"It would be better for you. You would, I rather think, be the natural heir." Katherine only shook her head. "Of course it is not likely. Still, I have known him destroy one will before he made another. He has made four or five, to my knowledge. So it is wiser not to hope for anything. I shall always do what I can for you. Now you are quite cold and shivering. I would advise your going to your room, and keeping there out of the way. You can do no more for your uncle, and I will send your mother to you as soon as I can. I suppose you have the keys of the house?"
Katherine bowed her head. She seemed tongue-tied. Only when Mr. Newton took her hand to say good-by she burst out, "You will send my mother to me soon—soon!"
Then she went away to her own room. Locking the door, she sat down and buried her face in the cushions of the sofa. She felt her thoughts in the wildest confusion, as if some separate exterior self was exerting a strange power over her. It had said to her, "Be silent," when Mr. Newton spoke of the possibility of not finding the will, and she had obeyed without the smallest intention to do good or evil. Some force she could not resist—or rather she did not dream of resisting—imposed silence on her. To what had this silence committed her? To nothing. When Mr. Newton came and examined the bureau he would no doubt open the drawer of the writing-table also. She had locked it, and put the key in the little basket where the keys of her scantily supplied store closet and of the cellaret lay: there it stood on the round table near the window, with her ink-bottle and blotting-book. She sat up and looked at it fixedly. That little key was all that intervened between her and rest, freedom, enjoyment. The more she recalled her uncle's words and manner on the day he had dictated his first note to Mr. Newton, the more convinced she felt that he had intended to provide for her, and now his intentions would be frustrated, and the will the old man wished to suppress would be the instrument by which his possessions would be distributed.
It was too bad. She did not know how closely the hope of her mother's emancipation from the long hard struggle with poverty and its attendant evils by means of Uncle Liddell's possible bequest had twined itself round her heart. Now she could not give it up. It seemed to her that her mental grasp refused to relax.
She rose and began to make some little arrangement for her mother's comfort, and presently the servant came to ask if she would take some tea.
"I'm sure, miss, you must be faint for want of food, and we are just going to have some—the woman and me."
"What woman?"
"A very respectable person as Dr. Bilham sent in to—to attend to the poor old gentleman, miss."
"Ah! thank you. I could not take anything now. I expect my mother soon; then I shall be glad of some tea.