True, it was to go in
such a way by this last will as to make Jack happy in his new
school. I could have let that go, if that was all. There are
other fortunes that have been laid at my feet. But I wanted Jack,
and I knew Jack wanted me. Dear boy, he never could realise how
utterly unhappy intellectual poverty would have made me and how
my unhappiness would have reacted on him in the end. In reality
this great and beneficent philanthropy was finally to blight both
our love and our lives.
"What was I to do? Stand by and see my life and my love ruined or
refuse Jack for the fortune of a man I did not love? Helen Bond
is not that kind of a woman, I said to myself. I consulted the
greatest lawyer I knew. I put a hypothetical case to him, and
asked his opinion in such a way as to make him believe he was
advising me how to make an unbreakable will. He told me of
provisions and clauses to avoid, particularly in making
benefactions. That was what I wanted to know. I would put one of
those clauses in my uncle's will. I practised uncle's writing
till I was as good a forger of that clause as anyone could have
become. I had picked out the very words in his own handwriting to
practise from.
"Then I went to Paris and, as you have guessed, learned how to get
things out of a safe like that of uncle's.
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