“You have come to see my husband, Mr. Benson?” she said.
“Yes, Mrs. Landray; he sent for me.” He hesitated an instant, for he did not wish to tell her of the nature of the business that had brought him out from the town. Then he added in a matter of fact tone: “I suppose it's something to do with this California project.”
Mrs. Landray's face flushed, then it grew very white; she paused and her foot tapped the ground nervously.
“They are two very foolish men, Mr. Benson—I mean my husband and his brother.”
“Then he has told you?” he said quickly.
“That he is going with the party—yes.”
She put out her hand and touched the reins Benson loosely held. “You can spare me a moment? I have been waiting for you.”
He bowed a trifle stiffly. To him she had always seemed, if anything, too undemonstrative, too self-reliant; but he saw now that she was shaken out of her dignity and serenity; she was struggling as her mother and her mother's mother before her had struggled, when the wilderness spoke to the men they loved; and she was knowing as they must have known, that this masculine passion which no woman could comprehend, much less share in, but against which she had set her love, was as vital as that love itself.
The lawyer put his hand in the breast pocket of his coat upon a paper there; one sentence in this paper burned in his memory: To my dearly beloved wife, Virginia Randolph Landray, and then the description of the property Stephen Landray owned and wished to pass to her in the event of his death. Benson had drawn up the will only the week before, and he was now taking it to Landray to be signed and witnessed. “I am a childless man, Benson,” Landray had said, “and should anything happen to me, I want every dollar I own on earth to go to her.” And Landray had shown no little emotion, for the moment putting aside the habitual reserve with which he cloaked any special stress of feeling.
“But what do you want with a will?” Benson had asked. “Whom have you but your wife?”