First she took me aside and gave me an _ex parte_ and rather highly colored statement of the facts in the affair, explaining that her protégée was diffident and reticent, unless stirred up about the children, and perorating with the remark, “You will find, John, that my meek-looking lamb is quite a ferocious animal when roused.” Then she went over to the other woman, kissed her, gave the boy a pile of my cherished law-books to use as building-blocks, took the tiny girl on her lap, hitched her chair a bit closer to the mother and said, “Now, my dear, you tell John everything, just as you told it to me, and he will fix it all up for you.” A tolerable portion of my fairly large practice has consisted, and, I fancy, will continue to consist, of charity cases brought to me by my wife. They have, of course, seldom or never been profitable; they have cost time, work, worry and money, have occasionally been paid in the base coin of ingratitude, and without them we should have had a much larger bank account. But the warmest-hearted and most generous woman I have ever known likes me to help those she thinks are wronged, and it is little enough for me to do for her dear sake. My small, scared client attracted me from the first, and my dusty legal heart ached over her sad story. Her mother had never cared much for her and had lavished love and money on her brother. She had married unfortunately, while scarcely more than a child. The estrangement with her mother had increased, and her brother had craftily widened the breach. This last fact I had much trouble to elicit, and wormed it out of her piecemeal. After three years of neglect and ill-treatment, her husband had deserted her and run away with another woman—incidentally, her best friend—leaving her almost destitute. When she recovered from an attack of brain fever she found a letter from her brother awaiting her, in which he announced the death of their mother, his marriage to the trained nurse who had taken care of the mother in her last illness, and their exodus to Europe. He inclosed a copy of the will, which left everything unreservedly to him, and said that his attorney would communicate with her. The man-of-the-law came in person, and stated that he was empowered to pay her a hundred dollars a month, so long as she did not attempt litigation. The will was witnessed by the doctor and the trained nurse, and the doctor was, to all intents, beyond discovery. It was, on its face, a probable case of undue influence and, perhaps, mental aberration. But how prove either, without the doubly expert testimony of the missing physician, who, it appeared, was the only person, except the son and the nurse, that had seen the invalid during the last year of her life?