“None whatever. You know that as well as I do,” he replied. “There is only one thing that would free you.”
“What?” exclaimed Captain Beverley, eagerly, stopping short and facing his cousin.
“Alys’s death,” said Mr Cheviott.
Arthur shuddered.
“For shame, Laurence,” he said, angrily. “Do you think it’s good taste, or good feeling either, to sneer in that way when you must—when you cannot but see what all this is to me?”
“It is not pleasant to myself,” observed Mr Cheviott, “which never seems to occur to you, as I said before. My allusion to Alys’s death should remind you of this. As things are, nothing—really nothing else than the death of the creature dearest to me on earth can clear me from the odious position I am placed in.”
Arthur looked at his cousin, first with surprise—it was so seldom Laurence talked of himself or of his own feelings—then gradually with a dawning of sympathy in his kindly eyes.
“Laurence,” he exclaimed, softly. That was all, and for a few moments there was silence.
“Did no one know of what my father was doing when he made that insane codicil? Could no one have prevented it—he was with your father at the time?” said Arthur, presently.
“No one knew of it,” replied Mr Cheviott, “not even his own lawyer; he must have had a consciousness that it would be disapproved of. I think the idea of saving you from the sort of marriage he had made himself had become a monomania with him—that, and the wish to repay to his sister’s child, in some way, what she had done for him. He knew little Alys would not be rich (her coming into Aunt Bethune’s money was never thought of then), and he was so extraordinarily fond of the child.”