There was further information I wished to obtain,
and I did not blush to pluck it from Stoddard before
I let him go that night. Olivia Gladys Armstrong lived
in Cincinnati; her father was a wealthy physician at
Walnut Hills. Stoddard knew the family, and I asked
questions about them, their antecedents and place of
residence that were not perhaps impertinent in view of
the fact that I had never consciously set eyes on their
daughter in my life. As I look back upon it now my
information secured at that time, touching the history
and social position of the Armstrongs of Walnut Hills,
Cincinnati, seems excessive, but the curiosity which the
Reverend Paul Stoddard satisfied with so little trouble
to himself was of immediate interest and importance.
As to the girl in gray I found him far more difficult.
She was Marian Devereux; she was a niece of Sister
Theresa; her home was in New York, with another
aunt, her parents being dead; and she was a frequent
visitor at St. Agatha's.
The wayward Olivia and she were on excellent terms,
and when it seemed wisest for that vivacious youngster
to retire from school at the mid-year recess Miss Devereux
had accompanied her home, ostensibly for a visit,
but really to break the force of the blow. It was a pretty
story, and enhanced my already high opinion of Miss
Devereux, while at the same time I admired the unknown
Olivia Gladys none the less.
When Stoddard left me I dug out of a drawer my
copy of John Marshall Glenarm's will and re-read it for
the first time since Pickering gave it to me in New
York. There was one provision to which I had not
given a single thought, and when I had smoothed the
thin type-written sheets upon the table in my room I
read it over and over again, construing it in a new light
with every reading.
Provided, further, that in the event of the marriage of
said John Glenarm to the said Marian Devereux, or in the
event of any promise or contract of marriage between said
persons within five years from the date of said John Glenarm's
acceptance of the provisions of this will, the whole
estate shall become the property absolutely of St. Agatha's
School at Annandale, Wabana County, Indiana, a corporation
under the laws of said state.
"Bully for the old boy!" I muttered finally, folding
the copy with something akin to reverence for my
grandfather's shrewdness in closing so many doors upon
his heirs. It required no lawyer to interpret this
paragraph. If I could not secure his estate by settling
at Glenarm for a year I was not to gain it by marrying
the alternative heir. Here, clearly, was not one of those
situations so often contrived by novelists, in which the
luckless heir presumptive, cut off without a cent, weds
the pretty cousin who gets the fortune and they live
happily together ever afterward. John Marshall Glenarm
had explicitly provided against any such frustration
of his plans.