I took out of a little drawer in a bureau a miniature, a bundle of letters, and a broadly folded legal-looking document.
I offered them to Roger, but he waved them away.
"I do not want to look upon them—they are here!" He touched his forehead. "And one of them is here!" He laid his hand on his heart with that freedom of gesture which often comes to the dying, especially to those who have repressed themselves all their lives.
I looked down at the miniature and saw the picture of a girl, very pretty, beautiful indeed, but with that width between the eyes which, in fair women, gives a double look.
"Ailie, my brother’s wife!" he said, in answer to my glance. "These are her letters. Open them one by one and burn them."
I did as he bade me, throwing my eyes out of focus so that I might not read a word. But out of one fluttered a pressed flower. It was fixed on a card with a little lock of yellow hair arranged about it for a frame, fresh and crisp. And as I picked it up I could not help catching the prettily printed words:
"Let me look at that!" he said quickly. I gave it to him. He looked at the flower—a quick painful glance, but as he handed me back the card he laughed a little.
"It is a ’Forget-me-not,’" he said. Then in a musing tone he added: "_Well, Ailie, I never have!_"
So one by one the letters were burnt up, till only a black pile of ashes remained, in ludicrous contrast to the closely packed bundle I had taken from the drawer.
"Now burn the ribbon that kept them together, and look at the other paper."
I unfolded it. It was a will in holograph, the characters clear and strong, signed by Archibald Ruthven Campbell, of Inchtaggart, Argyleshire, devising all his estate and property to his son Roger, with only a bequest in money to his elder son!
I was dazed as I looked through it, and my lips framed a question. The young man smiled.
"My father’s last will," he said, "dated a month before his death. She never knew it." (Again he indicated the upper room where his mother’s body lay.) "_They_ never knew it." (He looked at the girl’s picture as it smiled up from the table where I had laid it.) "My brother Archie succeeded on a will older by twenty years. But when I lost Ailie, I lost all. Why should she marry a failure? Besides, I truly believe that she loves my brother, at least as well as ever she loved me. It is her nature. That she is infinitely happier with him, I know."