His property was entirely at his own disposal, and was of two kinds.  Property in land (I purposely abstain from using technical language), and property in money.  In the majority of cases, I am afraid I should have felt it my duty to my client to ask him to reconsider his Will.  In the case of Sir John, I knew Lady Verinder to be, not only worthy of the unreserved trust which her husband had placed in her (all good wives are worthy of that)—­but to be also capable of properly administering a trust (which, in my experience of the fair sex, not one in a thousand of them is competent to do).  In ten minutes, Sir John’s Will was drawn, and executed, and Sir John himself, good man, was finishing his interrupted nap.

Lady Verinder amply justified the confidence which her husband had placed in her.  In the first days of her widowhood, she sent for me, and made her Will.  The view she took of her position was so thoroughly sound and sensible, that I was relieved of all necessity for advising her.  My responsibility began and ended with shaping her instructions into the proper legal form.  Before Sir John had been a fortnight in his grave, the future of his daughter had been most wisely and most affectionately provided for.

The Will remained in its fireproof box at my office, through more years than I Like to reckon up.  It was not till the summer of eighteen hundred and forty-eight that I found occasion to look at it again under very melancholy circumstances.

At the date I have mentioned, the doctors pronounced the sentence on poor Lady Verinder, which was literally a sentence of death.  I was the first person whom she informed of her situation; and I found her anxious to go over her Will again with me.

It was impossible to improve the provisions relating to her daughter.  But, in the lapse of time, her wishes in regard to certain minor legacies, left to different relatives, had undergone some modification; and it became necessary to add three or four Codicils to the original document.  Having done this at once, for fear of accident, I obtained her ladyship’s permission to embody her recent instructions in a second Will.  My object was to avoid certain inevitable confusions and repetitions which now disfigured the original document, and which, to own the truth, grated sadly on my professional sense of the fitness of things.

The execution of this second Will has been described by Miss Clack, who was so obliging as to witness it.  So far as regarded Rachel Verinder’s pecuniary interests, it was, word for word, the exact counterpart of the first Will.  The only changes introduced related to the appointment of a guardian, and to certain provisions concerning that appointment, which were made under my advice.  On Lady Verinder’s death, the Will was placed in the hands of my proctor to be “proved” (as the phrase is) in the usual way.

In about three weeks from that time—­as well as I can remember—­the first warning reached me of something unusual going on under the surface.  I happened to be looking in at my friend the proctor’s office, and I observed that he received me with an appearance of greater interest than usual.