“Not a penny,” said the old gentleman—“not a penny. Everything has gone the one way—perhaps it was not wonderful—to her own child.”
“I could not have done that!” cried the lady. “Oh, I could not have done it! I would have felt it would bring a curse upon my own child.”
“Perhaps, madam, you never had a child of your own, which would make all the difference,” he said.
She looked at him again, silent, with her lips pressed very closely together, and a kind of defiance in her eyes.
“But this,” he said again, softly, “is no answer to my question. You were a witness of Mrs. Bristow’s will, and you signed a certain name to it. You cannot have done so hoping to vitiate the document by a feigned name. It would have been perfectly futile to begin with, and no woman could have thought of such a thing. That was, I presume, your lawful name?”
“It is a name I have never borne; that you will very easily ascertain.”
“Still it is your name, or why should you have signed it—in inadvertence, I suppose?”
“Not certainly in inadvertence. Has anything ever made it familiar to me? If you will know, I had my reasons. I thought the sight of it might put things in a lawyer’s hands, would maybe guide inquiries, would make easier an object of my own.”
“That object,” said Mr. Templar, “was to discover your husband?”
She half rose to her feet, flushed and angry.