"How can I tell?" with a nervous shudder. "If I lived with you as your wife for years, you would be none the less a stranger to me."
"Miss Swendon," suddenly, and with the indulgent smile which he would have given to a child, "I will not accept such an answer. Take time. Consider the matter calmly. You speak rashly now. You have not a single reason to give for your decision."
"No," said Jane quietly. "But I shall not alter it."
"This woman," thought Van Ness, "is all mule." But he went on blandly: "In any other case the fact that you were possessed of large means and that I am almost penniless would have deterred me from approaching you in this way—"
"The money counts for nothing with me," quickly.
"I know that. I know that if you were my wife your generous nature would rejoice in giving it to me in furtherance of my great work. In fact—" He stopped, measured her again with the same hesitating inspection, and then, while Jane listened intently, proceeded: "To be quite candid, Miss Swendon, but for a sudden and most unexpected change in Mr. Laidley's disposition on the last day of his life, my Home for Friendless Children would have been made a certainty without your aid."
"What do you mean?"
"The will," deliberately, "which he made but a week before his death left his whole property intact to me as trustee for this charity. You know that he changed his mind and destroyed this will apparently in the very act of dying, and gave it to you. I am rejoiced that he did so: be assured of that. But if it should come back, after all, to the Home, and you with it as a helper, there would be a fine poetic justice in that, I think," with a pleased gurgle in his throat.
Mr. Van Ness had always regarded Jane as a young, insignificant-looking girl. But now, for some strange reason, she impressed him as a middle-aged, powerful woman.
"So you were the heir?"