It was not till the summer of eighteen hundred
and forty-eight that I found occasion to look at it again under very
melancholy circumstances.
At the date I have mentioned, the doctors pronounced the sentence on
poor Lady Verinder, which was literally a sentence of death. I was the
first person whom she informed of her situation; and I found her anxious
to go over her Will again with me.
It was impossible to improve the provisions relating to her daughter.
But, in the lapse of time, her wishes in regard to certain minor
legacies, left to different relatives, had undergone some modification;
and it became necessary to add three or four Codicils to the original
document. Having done this at once, for fear of accident, I obtained
her ladyship's permission to embody her recent instructions in a
second Will. My object was to avoid certain inevitable confusions and
repetitions which now disfigured the original document, and which, to
own the truth, grated sadly on my professional sense of the fitness of
things.
The execution of this second Will has been described by Miss Clack, who
was so obliging as to witness it. So far as regarded Rachel Verinder's
pecuniary interests, it was, word for word, the exact counterpart of the
first Will.
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