In vain both her lawyer and myself remonstrated with her on the unusual and hazardous nature of this arrangement.  We told her that sensible people will not take a more sanguine view concerning human nature than the Courts of Chancery do.  We said, in fact, everything that anyone else would say.  She admitted everything, but urged that her time was short, that nothing would induce her to leave her money to her nephew in the usual way.  “It is an unusually foolish will,” she said, “but he is an unusually foolish boy;” and she smiled quite merrily at her little sally.  Like all the rest of her family, she was very stubborn when her mind was made up.  So the thing was done as she wished it.

No provision was made for either my death or Ernest’s—­Miss Pontifex had settled it that we were neither of us going to die, and was too ill to go into details; she was so anxious, moreover, to sign her will while still able to do so that we had practically no alternative but to do as she told us.  If she recovered we could see things put on a more satisfactory footing, and further discussion would evidently impair her chances of recovery; it seemed then only too likely that it was a case of this will or no will at all.

When the will was signed I wrote a letter in duplicate, saying that I held all Miss Pontifex had left me in trust for Ernest except as regards 5000 pounds, but that he was not to come into the bequest, and was to know nothing whatever about it directly or indirectly, till he was twenty-eight years old, and if he was bankrupt before he came into it the money was to be mine absolutely.  At the foot of each letter Miss Pontifex wrote, “The above was my understanding when I made my will,” and then signed her name.  The solicitor and his clerk witnessed; I kept one copy myself and handed the other to Miss Pontifex’s solicitor.

When all this had been done she became more easy in her mind.  She talked principally about her nephew.  “Don’t scold him,” she said, “if he is volatile, and continually takes things up only to throw them down again.  How can he find out his strength or weakness otherwise?  A man’s profession,” she said, and here she gave one of her wicked little laughs, “is not like his wife, which he must take once for all, for better for worse, without proof beforehand.  Let him go here and there, and learn his truest liking by finding out what, after all, he catches himself turning to most habitually—­then let him stick to this; but I daresay Ernest will be forty or five and forty before he settles down.  Then all his previous infidelities will work together to him for good if he is the boy I hope he is.