No Name

He took another bite at the quill. The perspiration began to appear on his face.

'The difficulty is,' he remarked, 'to say how much.'

'Your lamented father, sir,' rejoined Mrs. Lecount, 'met that difficulty (if you remember) at the time of his last illness?'

'I don't remember,' said Noel Vanstone, doggedly.

'You were on one side of his bed, sir, and I was on the other. We were vainly trying to persuade him to make his will. After telling us he would wait and make his will when he was well again, he looked round at me, and said some kind and feeling words which my memory will treasure to my dying day. Have you forgotten those words, Mr. Noel?'

'Yes,' said Mr. Noel, without hesitation.

'In my present situation, sir,' retorted Mrs. Lecount, 'delicacy forbids me to improve your memory.'

She looked at her watch, and relapsed into silence. He clinched his hands, and writhed from side to side of his chair in an agony of indecision. Mrs. Lecount passively refused to take the slightest notice of him.

'What should you say—?' he began, and suddenly stopped again.

'Yes, sir?'

'What should you say to—a thousand pounds?'

Mrs. Lecount rose from her chair, and looked him full in the face, with the majestic indignation of an outraged woman.

'After the service I have rendered you to-day, Mr. Noel,' she said, 'I have at least earned a claim on your respect, if I have earned nothing more. I wish you good-morning.'

'Two thousand!' cried Noel Vanstone, with the courage of despair.

Mrs. Lecount folded up her papers and hung her traveling-bag over her arm in contemptuous silence.

'Three thousand!'

Mrs. Lecount moved with impenetrable dignity from the table to the door.

'Four thousand!'

Mrs. Lecount gathered her shawl round her with a shudder, and opened the door.

'Five thousand!'

He clasped his hands, and wrung them at her in a frenzy of rage and suspense. 'Five thousand' was the death- cry of his pecuniary suicide.

Mrs. Lecount softly shut the door again, and came back a step.

'Free of legacy duty, sir?' she inquired.

'No.'

Mrs. Lecount turned on her heel and opened the door again.

'Yes.'

Mrs. Lecount came back, and resumed her place at the table as if nothing had happened.

'Five thousand pounds, free of legacy duty, was the sum, sir, which your father's grateful regard promised me in his will,' she said, quietly. 'If you choose to exert your memory, as you have not chosen to exert it yet, your memory will tell you that I speak the truth. I accept your filial performance of your father's promise, Mr. Noel—and there I stop. I scorn to take a mean advantage of my position toward you; I scorn to grasp anything from your fears. You are protected by my respect for myself, and for the Illustrious Name I bear. You are welcome to all that I have done, and to all that I have suffered in your service. The widow of Professor Lecompte, sir, takes what is justly hers—and takes no more!'

As she spoke those words, the traces of sickness seemed, for the moment, to disappear from her face; her eyes shone with a steady inner light; all the woman warmed and brightened in the radiance of her own triumph— the triumph, trebly won, of carrying her point, of vindicating her integrity, and of matching Magdalen's incorruptible self-denial on Magdalen's own ground.

'When you are yourself again, sir, we will proceed. Let us wait a little first.'

She gave him time to compose himself; and then, after first looking at her Draft, dictated the second paragraph of the will, in these terms:

'I give and bequeath to Madame Virginie Lecompte (widow of Professor Lecompt e, late of Zurich) the sum of Five Thousand Pounds, free of Legacy Duty. And, in making this bequest, I wi sh to place it on record that I am not only expressing my own sense of Madame Lecompte's attachment and fidelity in the capacity of my housekeeper, but that I also believe myself to be executing the intentions of my deceased father, who, but for the circumstance of his dying intestate, would have left Madame Lecompte, in his will, the same token of grateful regard for her services which I now leave her in mine.'

'Have you written the last words, sir?'

'Yes.'

Mrs. Lecount leaned across the table and offered Noel Vanstone her hand.

'Thank you, Mr. Noel,' she said. 'The five thousand pounds is the acknowledgment on your father's side of what I have done for him. The words in the will are the acknowledgment on yours.'

A faint smile flickered over his face for the first time. It comforted him, on reflection, to think that matters might have been worse. There was balm for his wounded spirit in paying the debt of gratitude by a sentence not