a consolation to him in his last days to
think that his son Willan would succeed to everything, and the Dubois
blood remain still in its own muddy channel. It is evident that before
he died he had come to think coldly of his wife; for his mention of her
in his will was of the curtest, and his provision for her during her
lifetime, though amply sufficient for her real needs, not at all in
keeping with the style in which she had dwelt with him.

The exiled Willan had returned to America a year before his father's
death. He was a quiet, well-educated, rather scholarly young man. It
would be foolish to deny that his filial sentiment had grown cool during
the long years of his absence, and that it received some violent shocks
on his return to his father's house. But he was full of ambition, and
soon saw the opening which lay before him for distinction and wealth as
the ultimate owner of the Blaycke estates. To this end he bent all his
energies. He had had in England a good legal education; he was a clear
thinker and a ready speaker, and speedily made himself so well known and
well thought of, that when his father died there were many who said it
was well the old man had been taken away in time to leave the young
Willan a property worthy of his talents and industry.

Willan had lived in his father's house more as a guest than as a son. To
the woman who was his father's wife, and sat at the head of his father's
table, he bore himself with a distant courtesy, which was far more
irritating to her coarse nature than open antagonism would have been.
But Jeanne Dubois was clever woman enough to comprehend her own
inferiority to both father and son, and to avoid collisions with either.
She had won what she had played for, and on the whole she had not been
disappointed. As she had never loved her husband, she cared little that
he did not love her; and as for the upstart of a boy with his fine airs,
well, she would bide her time for that, Jeanne thought,--for it had
never crossed Jeanne's mind that when her husband died she would not be
still the mistress of the fine stone house and the gilt panelled coach,
and have more money than she knew what to do with. Many malicious
reveries she had indulged in as to how, when that time came, she would
"send the fellow packing," "he shouldn't stay in her house a day." So,
when it came to pass that the cards were turned, and it was Willan who
said to her, on the morning after his father's funeral