should hold it in trust for him till he
was twenty-eight years old, but neither he nor anyone else, except her
lawyer and myself, was to know anything about it. She would leave 5000
pounds in other legacies, and 15,000 pounds to Ernest--which by the time
he was twenty-eight would have accumulated to, say, 30,000 pounds. "Sell
out the debentures," she said, "where the money now is--and put it into
Midland Ordinary."

"Let him make his mistakes," she said, "upon the money his grandfather
left him. I am no prophet, but even I can see that it will take that boy
many years to see things as his neighbours see them. He will get no help
from his father and mother, who would never forgive him for his good luck
if I left him the money outright; I daresay I am wrong, but I think he
will have to lose the greater part or all of what he has, before he will
know how to keep what he will get from me."

Supposing he went bankrupt before he was twenty-eight years old, the
money was to be mine absolutely, but she could trust me, she said, to
hand it over to Ernest in due time.

"If," she continued, "I am mistaken, the worst that can happen is that he
will come into a larger sum at twenty-eight instead of a smaller sum at,
say, twenty-three, for I would never trust him with it earlier, and--if
he knows nothing about it he will not be unhappy for the want of it."

She begged me to take 2000 pounds in return for the trouble I should have
in taking charge of the boy's estate, and as a sign of the testatrix's
hope that I would now and again look after him while he was still young.
The remaining 3000 pounds I was to pay in legacies and annuities to
friends and servants.

In vain both her lawyer and myself remonstrated with her on the unusual
and hazardous nature of this arrangement. We told her that sensible
people will not take a more sanguine view concerning human nature than
the Courts of Chancery do. We said, in fact, everything that anyone else
would say. She admitted everything, but urged that her time was short,
that nothing would induce her to leave her money to her nephew in the
usual way. "It is an unusually foolish will," she said, "but he is an
unusually foolish boy;" and she smiled quite merrily at her little sally.
Like all the rest of her family, she was very stubborn when her mind was
made up. So the thing was done as she wished it.

No provision was made for either my death or Ernest's--Miss Pontifex had
settled