“You will excuse me, sirs, if I cannot converse with you, and if I leave you now. After to-day I shall be always at your disposition for any business that may require me. Meantime, consider this house yours. Come, my dear mother.” She took her mother’s hand and forced her to rise; then made a low formal curtsey to the men present and passed out of the room, leading her mother with her. “Well, I never,” said one of the city gentlemen. “She knows the time o’ day,” said the other. “I think she’ll be near,” said the country lawyer. “She’s mighty grand and distant,” said the first speaker. The London solicitor said nothing. He admired her. But he felt that she would not be an easy client if she left the affairs in his hands. She would want to know the why and the wherefore of everything. No man of law likes that. Katherine, when she was alone with her mother in her own rooms, bent down and kissed Mrs. Massarene’s pale face. “Oh, my dear mother, what a shame to you, what an injustice and insult! Oh, if I had only known what he had done when he was living! Why would you never let me speak to him of his will?” Her voice shook with deep-rooted anger and exceeding pain. She was indignant to be made the instrument of her mother’s humiliation. “My dear, you wouldn’t have altered him,” said her mother, between her sobs. “He wished to lay me low, and he’s done it. But he was a great man, was poor William, all the same. It’s a bitter pill to swallow,” she continued, between her sobs, “and I don’t deserve it from him, for I toiled day and night for him, and with him, when neither of us had more than the clothes we stood up in, and ’twas just what I made by washing and cooking as kept us on our legs for the first year in that blackguard township. Of course I was in the way of late years. He would have liked to take a young wife with a great name, and have sons and that like. ’Twas only natural, perhaps; I was but a clog upon him. But he forgot all the early years we toiled together.” “It is an infamy! His will is the greatest crime of an abominable life!” said Katherine, with deep wrath shining in her eyes and quivering on her lips. “Hush! He was your father,” said his wife. “And he was a great man; there’s excuse for men as is great--they can’t be tied down like common folks.” Then, poor soul, she leaned her head on her hands and wept bitterly. This will, so short and simple in comparison with the enormous wealth it disposed of, had been the only one signed amongst the various testaments he had caused to be written. It had been made on his arrival in England when Katherine had been fourteen years old, when his ambitions had all centred in her, and on her head he had in imagination seen resting the circlet of some ducal coronet or princely crown.