for his plan. "I take it, ma'am, that you do not need the money
involved. You never will need it, the chances are. You are rich fur this
town--your husband is, anyway."

She replied then, and to the old man, harkening, it seemed that her
words fell sharp and brittle like breaking icicles. One thing, though,
might be said for her--she sought no roundabout course. She did not
quibble or seek to enwrap the main issue in specious excuses or
apologies for her position.

"I decline to do it," she said. "I do not feel that I have the right to
do it. I understand the motives which may have actuated you to interest
yourself in this affair, but I tell you very frankly that I have no
intention of surrendering my legal rights in the slightest degree. You
say I do not need the money, but in the very same breath you go on to
say the chances are that I shall never need it. So there you yourself
practically admit there is a chance that some day I might need it.
Besides, I do not rate my husband a rich man, though you may do so. He
is well-to-do, nothing more. And his business is uncertain--all business
is. He might lose every cent he has to-morrow in some bad investment or
some poor speculation.

"There is still another reason I think of: I have nothing--absolutely
nothing--in my own name. It irks me to ask my husband, generous though
he is, for every cent I use, to have to account to him for my personal
expenditures. Before I married him I earned my own living and I paid my
own way and learned to love the feeling of independence, the feeling of
having a little money that was all my own. My share of this inheritance
will provide me with a private fund, a fund upon which I may draw at
will, or which I may put away for a possible rainy day, just as I
choose."

"But ma'am," he blurted, knowing full well he was beaten, yet inspired
by a desperate, forlorn hope that some added plea from him might break
through the shell of this steel-surfaced selfishness--"but, ma'am, do
you stop to realize that it's your own mother who'd benefit by this
sacrifice on your part? Do you stop to consider that if there's one
person in all this world who's entitled--"

"Pardon me, sir, for interrupting you," she said crisply, her tone icy
and sharp, "but the one person who is entitled to most consideration at
my hands has not actually come into the world yet. It is of that person
that I must think. I had not meant to speak of this, but your insistence
for