He had certain plans in the back of his head that an uncomplicated will would greatly facilitate. He and Jennie had often talked about these plans, and Jennie had urged him to speak to his father about it someday while there was time. But Tom did not like to seem interested; and, too, there was something about his father, perhaps a kind of dignity that he did not understand, that made Tom embarrassed at the thought of broaching the subject of money. So Tom had never said a word to his father about the property.

Once or twice Tom’s father had dropped a word to the effect that if anything happened to him, Tom was to look after his sister, and Tom had always agreed, but there had never been anything definite spoken regarding the house or what money was left or even the life insurance. And Tom had never broken through the silence.

During that last afternoon when he had sat in the sickroom, tilted back against the wall in the shadows, clearing his throat now and then, he had been thinking about this. He had been wondering if, for all their sakes, he ought to try and rouse his father and find out just what he had done, how he had left things. But Marion had stayed so close to the bedside, and somehow he could not bring himself to speak about it with Marion there. There was something about Marion’s attitude that forbade any such thing.

But after his father had spoken to them about the house and about Marion, and said that he would understand, Tom had been uneasy. Perhaps after all his father had complicated things by putting Marion into the will in such a way that he would continually have to ask her advice and get her to sign papers and be always consulting her. He hoped against hope that his father had not been so foolish. Poor Father! He had always been so visionary. That was the word Tom could remember hearing his mother call his father. Visionary. She had said once that if father hadn’t been so visionary they might all have been rich by this time, and Tom had decided then and there that he would profit by his father’s mistakes and not be visionary.

But although Tom was a little worried, and thought about it quite often, he would not open the desk or try to find out anything about matters until his father was laid to rest. It did not seem fitting and right. Tom had his own ideas of what was the decent thing to do.

He waited until his sister had gone to her room and had had time to get to sleep, too, before he went to the den. It wasn’t in the least necessary for Marion to have to worry about business. She was a woman. To his way of thinking, women should not be bothered about business affairs; they only complicated matters. He always tried to make Jennie understand that, too. Sometimes he talked things over with her, of course, as she was his wife, but when it came to the actual business, he felt that he was the head of the family.

So he had told Jennie to go to bed, as he had some papers to look over and might not go up for an hour or so yet, and he took himself to his father’s desk, armed with his father’s keys.

But Jennie was not so easily put off as Tom thought. Jennie crept to her bed with an anxious heart. She had put the little key back on the bunch with the other keys and felt that no one in the world would ever find out that she had had it, but yet she could not sleep. She could not help lying there and listening for Tom.

Jennie did not feel that she had done anything actually wrong. Of course not, her strange little conscience told her briskly. Why, she might easily have destroyed that will and nobody been any the wiser. But Jennie felt most virtuous that she had not. Of course she would not do a thing like that! It would have been a crime in a way, even though its destruction was a good thing for all concerned. But to put it away carefully was another thing. The will was there.