it that we were neither of us going to die, and was too ill to go
into details; she was so anxious, moreover, to sign her will while still
able to do so that we had practically no alternative but to do as she
told us. If she recovered we could see things put on a more satisfactory
footing, and further discussion would evidently impair her chances of
recovery; it seemed then only too likely that it was a case of this will
or no will at all.

When the will was signed I wrote a letter in duplicate, saying that I
held all Miss Pontifex had left me in trust for Ernest except as regards
5000 pounds, but that he was not to come into the bequest, and was to
know nothing whatever about it directly or indirectly, till he was twenty-
eight years old, and if he was bankrupt before he came into it the money
was to be mine absolutely. At the foot of each letter Miss Pontifex
wrote, "The above was my understanding when I made my will," and then
signed her name. The solicitor and his clerk witnessed; I kept one copy
myself and handed the other to Miss Pontifex's solicitor.

When all this had been done she became more easy in her mind. She talked
principally about her nephew. "Don't scold him," she said, "if he is
volatile, and continually takes things up only to throw them down again.
How can he find out his strength or weakness otherwise? A man's
profession," she said, and here she gave one of her wicked little laughs,
"is not like his wife, which he must take once for all, for better for
worse, without proof beforehand. Let him go here and there, and learn
his truest liking by finding out what, after all, he catches himself
turning to most habitually--then let him stick to this; but I daresay
Ernest will be forty or five and forty before he settles down. Then all
his previous infidelities will work together to him for good if he is the
boy I hope he is.

"Above all," she continued, "do not let him work up to his full strength,
except once or twice in his lifetime; nothing is well done nor worth
doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily. Theobald and
Christina would give him a pinch of salt and tell him to put it on the
tails of the seven deadly virtues;"--here she laughed again in her old
manner at once so mocking and so sweet--"I think if he likes pancakes he
had perhaps better eat them on Shrove Tuesday, but this is enough." These
were the last coherent words she spoke. From that time she grew
continu