"I have met her accidentally, not secretly. Twice, I think it was: or three times, I am not sure. She chose to repeat things to me; I did not ask for them. Not that they were of any worth—as the unmolested retirement of George Heneage here proves."
He had been moving to the hall-door gradually. Sir Harry put a sudden question to him, quite upon impulse, he told me afterwards, just as the thought occurred.
"Has your wife's will ever been found?"
"What is that to you?" asked Mr. Edwin Barley, turning to face him.
"Little indeed. I am sorry to have mentioned it: it was not in any wish to add to the discomforts of the day. As I have, I will ask you to remember that there are others in the world as capable of error, not to say crime, as was poor George Heneage."
"Do you insinuate that I suppressed the will?" demanded Mr. Edwin Barley.
"No. The will could not disappear without hands; but I should be sorry to give the very faintest opinion as to whose hands they were that took it. With your great fortune, it seems next door to an impossibility that you could have suppressed it: on the other hand, you alone derived benefit. The thing is a puzzle to me, Mr. Edwin Barley."
"But that you seem to speak honestly in saying so, without sinister insinuation, I would knock you down, Sir Harry Chandos," was Edwin Barley's answer.
"I insinuate nothing; and I say neither more nor less than I have said. It was a paltry sum to run a risk for, whoever might have been guilty of the abstraction. Not only that: no blessing—or luck, as the world would call it—ever yet attended one who robbed the orphan."
"You would wish me to make a merit of generosity, and offer Miss Hereford a present of the money," said Mr. Edwin Barley, a ring of mockery in his tones.