contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. There
were contingencies of course--and they exactly produced the pity and
terror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin,
represented by her brother and nephew; it would be only of her
savings--fortunately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen, zealous and
long continued--that she might dispose by will; and it was but a
troubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, the
susceptible Henry would profit no less than the wanton Albert. Henry was
at any cost to be kept in life that he _might_ profit; the woeful
question, the question of delicacy, for a woman devoutly conscientious,
was how could anyone else, how, above all, could fifteen other persons,
be made to profit by his profiting? She had been as earnest a steward of
her brother's fortune as if directness of pressure on him, in a sense
favourable to her interests--that is to her sympathies, which were her
only interests--had been a matter of course with her; whereas in fact
she would have held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in the
least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew--and he was
older, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous--his inherited
property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person.
_There_ was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition of
Henry's savings without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in that,
alas, was the terror. Henry's savings--there had been no terror for her,
naturally, in beautifully husbanding his resources _for_ him--dangled,
naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to
whom, if he had but _had_ the initiative, he might have made the most
princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic
drollery, of the situation: that Henry's idea of a present was ten
cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when
one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest
way of inspiring him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous though
these would be with the generosity of his nature as shown by the
exuberance of his popcorn. The ideal solution would be his flashing to
intelligence just long enough to apprehend the case and, of his own
magnanimous movement, sign away everything; but that was a fairy-tale
stroke, and the fairies here somehow stood off.

Thus between the wealth of her earnestness and the poverty of