‘You are quite right, sir. But I was kept in the Master’s room till late in the afternoon on the day the will was drawn; and when I came back the draft had gone.’ ‘Then you should have taken care to go over it the next morning, when it came back.’ ‘If I had not been so very much occupied, no doubt it would have occurred to me. But the letter Mr. Lindsay wrote to us, particularly desiring that his nephew should prepare his will----’ ‘I don’t forget the letter; but it does not release us from all responsibility,’ interrupted the solicitor. ‘Has anything happened?’ asked the other. ‘Well, I should not be surprised if something does happen. It seems that the old gentleman altered an intention he had of leaving an enormous sum of money to the Scotch Presbyterians, and left them only five thousand pounds instead.’ ‘Rather a sensible thing to do, I should say,’ observed Mr. Beattie, with a smile. ‘Yes; but the odd thing is that one of the Presbyterian parsons, a Scotchman called Mackenzie, I think, says that he saw the draft’ (Mr. Beattie gave a hardly perceptible start), ‘and that in it the bequest was five hundred thousand pounds.’ ‘Then the old gentleman changed his mind later in the day, I suppose,’ put in the clerk. ‘And stranger still,’ pursued the solicitor, ‘this man says that he was present when the will was signed, that young Lindsay read it aloud before it was signed, and that he read the bequest “five hundred thousand.”’ ‘Really! That is very odd!’ ‘Very odd indeed.’ ‘Was anyone else present?’ ‘Yes, another nephew. And _he_ says that Lindsay read “five thousand pounds” only.’ ‘It is impossible that Lindsay should have committed a fraud. I won’t believe it of him for a moment!’ exclaimed the managing clerk warmly. ‘This nephew’s evidence is not disinterested, however,’ pursued Mr. Hatchett. ‘He shares the residue with young Lindsay; and it must be a very large sum, about half a million, I suppose.’ ‘Had the minister any interest in it, one way or the other?’ asked Beattie. ‘No; of course not. His name was in the will, though, as secretary to the trust, or something. Here it is,’ he added, unfolding the will as he spoke--‘at such a remuneration as the trustees in their discretion may decide.’ ‘Then the minister’s evidence is _not_ quite disinterested, any more than that of the other nephew?’ remarked Beattie. ‘No; but of course there is a vast difference between a few hundreds a year and a quarter of a million. And it seems odd that there should be all these elaborate directions about a secretary, and so on, if the bequest was meant to be only five thousand pounds.’