It was a significant fact that the daughter’s name was not mentioned in the instrument; and I suspected collusion on the part of the medical gentleman with the beneficiary and the woman who would share the profits of the criminal enterprise. My poor little client had seen the doctor once only when she was vainly endeavoring to gain access to her mother, and described him as a very fine-looking man on the sunny slope of forty, with wavy blond hair and pointed beard, a suave and kindly manner, a charming voice and singularly handsome hands. The bill of items would have fitted tolerably a dozen men of my acquaintance, and I said as much, asking her, as an afterthought, how she came to notice his hands. Someone has said that the gist of a woman’s letter is in the postscript, and the large majority of women that have employed me as counsel have invariably reserved the leading and important facts of their cases until the last. This client was no exception to the rule; but when the dramatic little body had finished personating the missing man, I would have known him as far as I could see him among ten thousand, unless he were asleep or quite still; for she had cleverly imitated a man whose restless hands were ever in motion as he talked, and who glanced at them with covert satisfaction every few seconds. This singular trick, the descriptive factors in his personal equation, and the name he had signed—which, she assured me, was undoubtedly his own—as witness to the signature of the testatrix were about all the additional information I could extract from her, except that she had refused her brother’s proposition and was ready to fight to the bitter end for her children’s rights, though she had to beg or steal the money to pay court and counsel. I waived retainer and took the case on contingent fee, which, after the little grass widow had left, I told my wife, in gentle irony, I would divide with her; but that she must not squander it on yachts and four-in-hands, because these big paying cases are pretty rare—fortunately. That good woman received my ironic suggestion with her usual placidity, and said: “Very well, my dear; I shall certainly hold you to your promise of division, and I have a premonition that we shall win the suit. Mark my words! I don’t want a yacht, but I shall buy that lovely Goldsborough place and spend my declining years looking at the river-view from that glorious, wide piazza.” I had not the slightest hope of success, for even if the witness could be found, I had no doubt that he was a scamp and in the brother’s pay.