“The missing will?” he repeated. “Whose will?”
“Our great-grand-aunt’s, of course,” she said impatiently. “The will she always promised to make, and which could never be found. Our great-grand-aunt, Elizabeth Morion! Oh! you do know about it!”
His face changed, he was beginning to take it in.
“And who found it, and where?” he said rapidly. “And why was I not told of it at once?”
Frances drew herself up.
“I found it,” she said, “this very afternoon, not an hour ago, in a panel in the old pew. And no one knows of it as yet—I meant, I thought it was right to tell you first.”
She held out the packet, but, before taking it from her, Mr Morion drew forward a chair.
“I will look through it as quickly as possible,” he said, “but do sit down.”
She did so, watching him intently as he opened out the stiff, crackling sheets, and set himself to study their contents. At first his face remained absolutely impassive. He had turned over three or four sides—after all, as such things go, it was not a very long document—when some sudden thought made him glance at the end. Then came a change, a strange change in his expression: he knit his brows and his whole face clouded in perplexity.
Now again, for the first time since entering the house, Frances remembered what, in her excitement, she had momentarily forgotten—that these must be the revers de la médaille, and her own face fell as she realised the blow that her discovery might cause to her kinsman.