objected that this was unnecessary.  The poor woman secretly besought Isa not to leave her alone with Plausaby, and Isabel positively refused to go away from her bedside.  For the first time Mr. Plausaby spoke harshly to Isa, and for the first time Isabel treated him with a savage neglect.  A housekeeper’s authority is generally supreme in the house, and Isa had gradually come to be the housekeeper.  She sat stubbornly by the dying woman during the whole night.

Mr. Plausaby had his course distinctly marked out.  In the morning he watched anxiously for the arrival of his trusted lawyer, Mr. Conger.  The property which he had married with his wife, and which she had derived from Albert’s father, had all been made over to her again to save it from Plausaby’s rather eager creditors.  He had spent the preceding day at Perritaut, whither Mr. Conger had gone to appear in a case as counsel for Plausaby, for the county-seat had recently returned to its old abode.  Mr. Plausaby intended to have his wife make some kind of a will that would give him control of the property and yet keep it under shelter.  By what legal fencing this was to be done nobody knows, but it has been often surmised that Mrs. Plausaby was to leave it to her husband in trust for the Metropolisville University.  Mr. Plausaby had already acquired experience in the management of trust funds, in the matter of Isa’s patrimony, and it would not be a feat beyond his ability for him to own his wife’s bequest and not to own it at the same time.  This was the easier that territorial codes are generally made for the benefit of absconding debtors.  He had made many fair promises about a final transfer of this property to Albert and Katy when they should both be of age, but all that was now forgotten, as it was intended to be.

Mr. Plausaby was nervous.  His easy, self-possessed manner had departed, and that impenetrable coat of mail being now broken up, he shuddered whenever the honest, indignant eyes of Miss Marlay looked at him.  He longed for the presence of the bustling, energetic man of law, to keep him in countenance.

When the lawyer came, he and Plausaby were closeted for half an hour.  Then Plausaby, Esq., took a walk, and the attorney requested an interview with Isabel.  She came in, stiff, cold, and self-possessed.

“Miss Marlay,” said the lawyer, smiling a little as became a man asking a favor from a lady, and yet looking out at Isa in a penetrating way from beneath shadowing eyebrows, “will you have the goodness to tell me the nature of the paper that Mrs. Plausaby signed yesterday?”

“Did Mrs. Plausaby sign a paper yesterday?” asked Isabel diplomatically.

“I have information to that effect.  Will you tell me whether that paper was of the nature of a will or deed or—­in short, what was its character?”

“I will not tell you anything about it.  It is Mrs. Plausaby’s secret.  I suppose you get your information from Mrs. Ferret.  If she chooses to tell you the contents, she may.”