“I guess she's made it a good deal more, if she's made it anything. Miss Claxon, don't you understand that if no will turns up, they come in for all her money.
“Well, that's what I thought they ought to do,” said Clementina.
“And do you understand that if that's so, you don't come in for anything? You must excuse me for mentioning it; but she has told everybody that you were to have it, and if there is no will—”
He stopped and bent an eye of lack-lustre compassion on the girl, who replied, “Oh, yes. I know that; it's what I always told her to do. I didn't want it.”
“You didn't want it?”
“No.”
“Well!” The vice-consul stared at her, but he forbore the comment that her indifference inspired. He said after a pause, “Then what we've got to do is to advertise for the Michigan relations, and let 'em take any action they want to.”
“That's the only thing we could do, I presume.”
This gave the vice-consul another pause. At the end of it he got to his feet. “Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Claxon?”
She went to her portfolio and produced Mrs. Lander's letter of credit. It had been made out for three thousand pounds, in Clementina's name as well as her own; but she had lived wastefully since she had come abroad, and little money remained to be taken up. With the letter Clementina handed the vice-consul the roll of Italian and Austrian bank-notes which she had drawn when Mrs. Lander decided to leave Venice; they were to the amount of several thousand lire and golden. She offered them with the insensibility to the quality of money which so many women have, and which is always so astonishing to men. “What must I do with these?” she asked.