“A sort of sporting interest in seeing whether she can win and carry off the bag, with the mine, from your hands, just as the other time I was immensely interested in seeing you escape from her hands at Jalapa. . . . She has a very pretty case, a very pretty case,” he mused. “The best legal talent have passed on it and found it quite flawless. It ought to go through without a hitch.”
“Unless the real heir should turn up meanwhile.”
“You still stick to that romantic fiction—that young man’s fancy?”
“You said that you had other reasons for helping Miss Walters?”
“One other reason: I felt that you had treated her—unsympathetically—oh, quite correctly from your puritan point of view; morally you are always above reproach, my young friend. But you are slightly inhuman. Your attitude that night when we discussed this matter at your house was both narrow and inhuman. It disgusted me, if you care to know frankly what I thought.”
“And in order to punish me for not following your advice you are conniving with this woman in the perpetration of fraud,” Brainard sneered.
“You use words rather crudely,” Hollinger replied in a mild tone. “I don’t understand ‘punish’ and ‘fraud’ in the way you do. You are determined to complicate a simple enough situation, and I am determined to give your virtue an all-round test. . . . Well, your mind is made up?”
“Absolutely!” Brainard exclaimed, rising to terminate the interview.
“Perhaps you have your own widow and child?” Hollinger suggested with a laugh.
“Possibly!”