otors, the clothes, the servants that I need--they are
as much a part of my life as your profession is of yours. I must have
them.

"And now it was all to slip from my hands. 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. Before God, all I planned
to do was to get that will, change it, replace it, and trust that uncle
would never notice the change. Then when he was gone, I would have
contested the will. I would have got my full share either by court
proceedings or by settlement out of court. You see, I had planned it all
out. The school would have been founded--I, we would have founded it.
What difference, I said, did thirty millions or fifty millions make to
an impersonal school, a school not yet even in existence? The twenty
million dollars or so difference, or even half of it, meant life and
love to me.

"I had planned to steal the cash in the safe, anything to divert
attention from the will and make it look like a plain robbery. I would
have done the altering of the will that night and have returned it to
the safe before morning. But it was not to be. I had almost opened the
safe when my uncle entered the room. His anger completely unnerved me,
and from the moment I saw him