The servants declared without hesitation that the document before them was the one they had signed, that and no other; and then everybody rose up and prepared to go. Miss Lindsay went up to Dr. Mackenzie as he passed into the hall, with the intention of offering him hospitality, but as she was on the point of speaking to him, Semple interrupted her, affecting not to see the minister, and speaking in a loud whisper: ‘My dear aunt, don’t you think that after what has happened to-day Dr. Mackenzie would be more comfortable at an hotel?’ The minister reddened and involuntarily clenched his fists. To do James Semple justice, this piece of rudeness was not a mere wanton insult. William Beattie had carefully instructed him that Alec Lindsay and the justly infuriated minister were not to be allowed to meet; and Semple thought it quite possible that if Dr. Mackenzie were staying in the house he might get Alec’s address from his aunt and go to him at once. The minister, holding his chin very high in the air, sent for a cab, and drove off with his friend, Dr. Adamson, in search of an hotel. As they jolted along one subject jostled with the great question of the will in the minister’s mind, sometimes altogether ousting it from his attention. Would it be fair, he was asking himself, for him to charge Dr. Adamson’s expenses as well as his own to the trust, if it should turn out to be five thousand pounds only, as he might unquestionably have done if the legacy had been one of half a million? And if not, seeing that he had asked Dr. Adamson to take what was really an unnecessary journey to London, and considering that his colleague’s family was twice as large as his own, would it not be incumbent upon him in equity to pay those expenses out of his, Dr. Mackenzie’s, own pocket? An Englishman would probably not have raised either point in the tribunal of his conscience. Dr. Mackenzie not only raised them, but argued them, and finally decided them against himself, consoling himself as he did so with that remarkably Scotch proverb, ‘It’s not lost that a friend gets.’ But the sum could ill be spared; and the loss of it did not tend to diminish his resentment against those defrauders of the temple, as Dr. Mackenzie considered them, James Lindsay’s nephews. END OF VOL. II. BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD. Transcriber’s Note: This book was written in a period when many words had not become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Dialect, obsolete, and misspelled words were not corrected. Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the end of the chapter. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed letters, were corrected.