There was so much treachery in this that he was thunderstruck. How little he had sounded the depths of her character, if she was capable of this.
"Brother," she said, "you can tell me what I have never had the courage to find out for myself. Will anything in those papers raise my husband in my estimation, or will they lower him in my eyes?"
"How can I tell what your estimation of your husband is?" he asked, roughly; "he was a kind good-hearted fellow, not a man of business, but thoughtful and good about you. You have nothing to complain of."
Nothing to complain of! thoughtful about her! Poor Mrs. Dorriman thought she could not have heard aright. "He left me dependent," she said, with a sob in her voice.
Mr. Sandford shrank, then he said, quickly,
"What have you wanted that you have not had from me?"
"Ah, brother! it is not the same; you do not know how bitter it is to owe everything, to be under an obligation, when it ought not to have been necessary. I should have had my own."
This cry, the outcome of months, and even years, of a perpetual grief to Mrs. Dorriman, was an entirely new light to her brother, whose coarser view of life was that so long as money, food, and clothes were forthcoming it did not matter from whom they came. He was also one of the men who imagine that a woman has no business with money; who conceive that they are not fitted by nature for disposing of any investment or even controlling their income beyond that portion of it allotted to them for the payment of a butcher's bill, or the purchase of some more or less frivolous article of wearing apparel.
He stared at her in silence, conscious that this new phase of her character must be thought over when she was not there. Then he said:
"Write for those papers; there is nothing in them to injure your husband in your eyes. He did think about you."