Sir Charles said nothing, but pulled his moustache. He had no habit of making allowances or maintaining poor relations, and the demand seemed overwhelming to him too. “These are things which concern your father’s credit, Lady Somers. I think it would be worth your while to attend to them for his sake. The other is for your own. You cannot allow your sister, Miss Katherine, to go out into the world on five hundred a year while you have sixty thousand. I am a plain man and only an attorney, and you are a beautiful young lady, full, I have no doubt, of fine feelings. But I don’t think, if you consider the subject, that for your own credit you can allow this singular difference in the position of two sisters to be known.” Stella was silent for a moment. She was struck dumb by the man’s grave face and his importance and the confidence of his tone. She said at last, almost with a whimper, “It was none of my doing. I was not here; I could not exercise any influence,” looking up at the old executor with startled eyes. “Yes,” he said, “I am aware you were far away, and your sister ought to have been the person to exercise influence. She did not, however,” he added with a little impatience. “There are some people who are too good for this world.” Too ineffectual--capable of neither good nor evil! Was it the same kind of incapacity as the others were discussing in the other room? “I’ve been saying that, don’t you know, to my wife, about Miss Kate,” said Sir Charles. “Oh, you’ve been saying!” cried Stella with a quick movement of impatience. She paused again for a little, and then fixing her eyes upon Mr. Sturgeon, said with some solemnity, “You wish me then, as soon as I have got over the first wonder of it, and being so glad that papa had forgiven me, to go right in his face and upset his last will?” The rectitude, the pathos, the high feeling that were in Stella’s voice and attitude are things that no ordinary pen could describe. Her father’s old executor looked at her startled. He took off his spectacles to see her more clearly, and then he put them on again. His faculties were not equal to this sudden strain upon them. “It would not be upsetting the will,” he said. “Would it not? But I think it would. Papa says a certain thing very distinctly. You may say it is not just. Many people are turning upon me--as if I had anything to do with it!--and saying it is unjust. But papa made all his money himself, I suppose? And if he had a special way in which he wished to spend it, why shouldn’t he be allowed to do that? It is not any vanity in me to say he was fondest of me, Mr. Sturgeon--everybody knew he was.”