“A married man?”
“He is a widower. He buried his wife a dozen or fifteen years ago. At one time he was some interested in farming, having no other business; but he gave that up also after his wife’s death, and, by degrees, the last dozen years has grown into a rather sour and crabbed old man.”
“A man of years, then?[{40}]”
“Yes; Jacob Moore is about seventy years old.”
“Any children?”
“Only one of his own—a girl named Mabel, now in the twenties, and who was married about a year ago to a man named Jeffrey. Besides this girl, Moore also has reared the son of a deceased sister. He is now a man of twenty-five and the Richard Thorpe who wired me the news of his uncle’s death.”
“Does Thorpe live with his uncle?”
“A portion of the time, though for the most part in Boston, where he is in the brokerage business.”
“Does the daughter live at home?”
“No, not for a year or more,” replied the lawyer. “And I now come to those painful circumstances which lead me to——”