meeting his brother's glance, direct,
shrewd, judicial, he stopped.

There was a silence.

"I've come in for my Will," said old Jolyon at last, tugging at his
moustache.

James' curiosity was roused at once. Perhaps nothing in this life was
more stimulating to him than a Will; it was the supreme deal with
property, the final inventory of a man's belongings, the last word on
what he was worth. He sounded the bell.

"Bring in Mr. Jolyon's Will," he said to an anxious, dark-haired clerk.

"You going to make some alterations?" And through his mind there flashed
the thought: 'Now, am I worth as much as he?'

Old Jolyon put the Will in his breast pocket, and James twisted his long
legs regretfully.

"You've made some nice purchases lately, they tell me," he said.

"I don't know where you get your information from," answered old Jolyon
sharply. "When's this action coming on? Next month? I can't tell what
you've got in your minds. You must manage your own affairs; but if you
take my advice, you'll settle it out of Court. Good-bye!" With a cold
handshake he was gone.

James, his fixed grey-blue eye corkscrewing round some secret anxious
image, began again to bite his finger.

Old Jolyon took his Will to the offices of the New Colliery Company, and
sat down in the empty Board Room to read it through. He answered
'Down-by-the-starn' Hemmings so tartly when the latter, seeing his
Chairman seated there, entered with the new Superintendent's first
report, that the Secretary withdrew with regretful dignity; and sending
for the transfer clerk, blew him up till the poor youth knew not where to
look.

It was not--by George--as he (Down-by-the-starn) would have him know, for
a whippersnapper of a young fellow like him, to come down to that office,
and think that he was God Almighty. He (Down-by-the-starn) had been head
of that office for more years than a boy like him could count, and if he
thought that when he had finished all his work, he could sit there doing
nothing, he did not know him, Hemmings (Down-by-the-starn), and so forth.

On the other side of the green baize door old Jolyon sat at the long,
mahogany-and-leather board table, his thick, loose-jointed, tortoiseshell
eye-glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, his gold pencil moving
down the clauses of his Will.

It was a simple affair, for there were none of those vexatious little
legacies and donations to charities, which fritter away a man's
poss