to go to law, as you propose, on the
subject of the Will.

"Believe me, dear sir, yours gratefully,

"MAGDALEN VANSTONE."

VIII.

_From Mr. Loscombe to Mrs. Noel Vanstone._

"Lincoln's Inn. November 17th.

"DEAR MADAM--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, answering
my proposal in the negative, for reasons of your own. Under these
circumstances--on which I offer no comment--I beg to perform my promise
of again communicating with you on the subject of your late husband's
Will.

"Be so kind as to look at your copy of the document. You will find that
the clause which devises the whole residue of your husband's estate to
Admiral Bartram ends in these terms: _to be by him applied to such uses
as he may think fit._

"Simple as they may seem to you, these are very remarkable words. In the
first place, no practical lawyer would have used them in drawing your
husband's will. In the second place, they are utterly useless to serve
any plain straightforward purpose. The legacy is left unconditionally
to the admiral; and in the same breath he is told that he may do what he
likes with it! The phrase points clearly to one of two conclusions. It
has either dropped from the writer's pen in pure ignorance, or it has
been carefully set where it appears to serve the purpose of a snare. I
am firmly persuaded that the latter explanation is the right one. The
words are expressly intended to mislead some person--yourself in all
probability--and the cunning which has put them to that use is a cunning
which (as constantly happens when uninstructed persons meddle with law)
has overreached itself. My thirty years' experience reads those words in
a sense exactly opposite to the sense which they are intended to convey.
I say that Admiral Bartram is _not_ free to apply his legacy to such
purposes as he may think fit; I believe he is privately controlled by a
supplementary document in the shape of a Secret Trust.

"I can easily explain to you what I mean by a Secret Trust. It is
usually contained in the form of a letter from a Testator to his
Executors, privately informing them of testamentary intentions on his
part which he has not thought proper openly to acknowledge in his will.
I leave you a hundred pounds; and I write a private letter enjoining
you, on taking the legacy, not to devote it to your own purposes, but to
give it to some third person, whose name I have my own reasons for not
mentioning in my will. That is a Sec