any observer been there
to watch them he might have seen by the faces of the two latter that
they expected an unpleasant meeting. Mr Gogram, as he had walked
across the hall, had pulled a document out of his pocket, and held
it in his hand as he took a chair. John Vavasor stood behind one of
the chairs which had been placed at the table, and leaned upon it,
looking across the room, up at the ceiling. George stood on the rug
before the fire, with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and
his coat tails over his arms.

"Gentlemen, will you sit down?" said Mr Gogram.

John Vavasor immediately sat down.

"I prefer to stand here," said George.

Mr Gogram then opened the document before him.

"Before that paper is read," said George, "I think it right to say a
few words. I don't know what it contains, but I believe it to have
been executed by my grandfather only an hour or two before his
death."

"On the day before he died,--early in the day," said the attorney.

"Well,--the day before he died; it is the same thing,--while he was
dying, in fact. He never got out of bed afterwards."

"He was not in bed at the time, Mr Vavasor. Not that it would have
mattered if he had been. And he came down to dinner on that day. I
don't understand, however, why you make these observations."

"If you'll listen to me you will understand. I make them because I
deny my grandfather's fitness to make a will in the last moments of
his existence, and at such an age. I saw him a few weeks ago, and he
was not fit to be trusted with the management of property then."

"I do not think this is the time, George, to put forward such
objections," said the uncle.

"I think it is," said George. "I believe that that paper purports to
be an instrument by which I should be villanously defrauded if it
were allowed to be held as good. Therefore I protest against it now,
and shall question it at law if action be taken on it. You can read
it now, if you please."

"Oh, yes, I shall read," said Mr Gogram; "and I say that it is as
valid a will as ever a man signed."

"And I say it's not. That's the difference between us."

The will was read amidst sundry interjections and expressions of
anger from George, which it is not necessary to repeat. Nor need I
trouble my readers with the will at length. It began by expressing
the testator's great desire that his property might descend in his
own family, and that the house might be held and inhabited by som