“Not ‘good-bye,’ grandma,” he protested heartily. “‘Good-night,’ not ‘good-bye.’ You _are_ better, and the doctor himself says so. Why, by next week——”
“Next week?” she said in the faintest voice in the world and with the remotest shadow of an elfin smile to herself. “Next week? Yes. You can—you can bring the baby to see me—next week.”
She just reached the end of that permission, her voice was so infinitely small and so drowsy; and her eyes closed before the last word;—she seemed to fall asleep even while she spoke. Dan tiptoed out, nodding to the nurse, who had been close at hand in the hall and came into the room as he left it.
Downstairs he found the courteous Nimbus waiting, as always, to unlatch the front door. But to-night the elderly servitor was solemn and unloquacious beyond his custom. “Goo’-ni’, suh,” he said. “I reckon you’ grammaw ’bout ready to let that big door swing. Yes, suh. Goo’-ni’, suh.”
Dan walked home, wondering what door Nimbus conceived himself to be talking about, and wondering more what his grandmother had meant him to remember. But at his own door he was abruptly enlightened upon Nimbus’s meaning about a “big” one. Harlan met him there and told him that the nurse had just telephoned.
Mrs. Savage would never explain what she had asked him to remember; she would never explain anything—never, forever.
THE day after her funeral Mr. Oliphant brought home a copy of her will and read it to his wife and their sons and daughter-in-law in the library. He read slowly, while his four auditors sat in a silence broken only once, though the document was a long one. The single interruption was a vocal sound from Dan when the bequest to himself was mentioned, an exclamation the import of which was not determinable by the others.
But before the reading Mr. Oliphant made some introductory remarks as he wiped his glasses: The estate appeared to be “somewhat larger than anticipated,” he said, as Mrs. Savage’s boxes in the bank’s deposit vaults contained securities she had never mentioned;—she had always been “very reticent in such matters.” The value of her possessions might be “estimated roughly at probably upward of eight hundred thousand dollars, in addition to her house and a small amount of other real estate.” Then he took up the typewritten sheets of the will.