al!

* * * * *

The clock had struck ten before Mr. Baines, the solicitor, knocked at
the door. Mary hesitated, and then took him upstairs in silence while he
suavely explained to her why he had been unable to come earlier. This
lawyer was a young Scotsman who had descended upon the town from
nowhere, bought a small decayed practice, and within two years had
transformed it into a large and flourishing business by one of those
feats of energy, audacity, and tact, combined, of which some Scotsmen
seem to possess the secret.

'Here is Mr. Baines, Edward,' Mary said quietly; and then, having
rearranged the sick man's pillow, she vanished out of the room and went
into the kitchen.

The gas-jet there showed only a point of blue, but she did not turn it
up. Dragging an old oak rush-seated rocking-chair near to the range,
where a scrap of fire still glowed, she rocked herself gently in the
darkness.

After about half an hour Mr. Baines's voice sounded at the head of the
stairs:

'Miss Beechinor, will ye kindly step up? We shall want some
asseestance.'

She obeyed, but not instantly.

In the bedroom Mr. Baines, a fountain-pen between his fine white teeth,
was putting some coal on the fire. He stood up as she entered.

'Mr. Beechinor is about to make a new will,' he said, without removing
the pen from his mouth, 'and ye will kindly witness it.'

The small room appeared to be full of Baines--he was so large and fleshy
and assertive. The furniture, even the chest of drawers, was dwarfed
into toy-furniture, and Beechinor, slight and shrunken-up, seemed like a
cadaverous manikin in the bed.

'Now, Mr. Beechinor.' Dusting his hands, the lawyer took a newly-written
document from the dressing-table, and, spreading it on the lid of a
cardboard box, held it before the dying man. 'Here's the pen. There!
I'll help ye to hold it.'

Beechinor clutched the pen. His wrinkled and yellow face, flushed in
irregular patches as though the cheeks had been badly rouged, was
covered with perspiration, and each difficult movement, even to the
slightest lifting of the head, showed extreme exhaustion. He cast at
Mary a long sinister glance of mistrust and apprehension.

'What is there in this will?'

Mr. Baines looked sharply up at the girl, who now stood at the side of
the bed opposite him. Mechanically she smoothed the tumbled bed-clothes.

'That's nowt to do wi' thee, lass,' said Beechinor resentfully.