"It's a shocking pity that you are turned from Verner's Pride!" resumed the doctor.
"It is. But there's no help for it."
"Does Sibylla grieve after it very much? Has it any real effect, think you, upon her health?—as she seemed to intimate."
"She grieves, no doubt. She keeps up the grief, if you can understand it, Dr. West. Not a day passes, but she breaks into lamentations over the loss, complaining loudly and bitterly. Whether her health would not equally have failed at Verner's Pride, I am unable to say. I think it would."
"John Massingbird, under the circumstances, ought to give it up to you. It is rightfully yours. Sibylla's life—and she is his own cousin—may depend upon it: he ought not to keep it. But for the loss of the codicil, he would never have come to it."
"Of course he could not," assented Lionel. "It is that loss which has upset everything."
Dr. West fell into silence, and continued in it until his house was in view. Then he spoke again.
"What will you undertake to give me, Mr. Verner, if I can bring John Massingbird to hear reason, and re-establish you at Verner's Pride?"
"Not anything," answered Lionel. "Verner's Pride is John Massingbird's according to the law; therefore it cannot be mine. Neither would he resign it."
"I wonder whether it could be done by stratagem?" mused Dr. West. "Could we persuade him that the codicil has turned up?—or something of that? It would be very desirable for Sibylla."