In the short story Motive v. Opportunity, Mary Clode is the niece of the wealthy Simon Clode. After the death of his own son and granddaughter, Simon had no living close relatives. He therefore took care of the children of a poor brother, comprising Mary and her siblings Grace and George. While George got a job moved out and Grace got married, Mary continued to stay with her uncle and looked after him. She would have inherited a third of her uncle's estate but this was disrupted by the arrival of a spiritualist medium Eurydice Spragg. Simon wanted to draft a new will to leave the bulk of his estate to this newcomer. How this is resolved forms the main plot of the story.
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