doubling money these
twenty years. He has left one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,--fifty
thousand to each of us."

Andrew's knees gave way. He sat down suddenly. He had but one thought. A
radiant future flashed the little room out of vision. That would be his
which for five years he had desired with all the insidious force of a
fixed idea.

"Say something, Andrew, for heaven's sake!" cried Polly, "or I shall
scream. Fifty thousand dollars all my own! No more school, no more
dress-making! We'll all go to Europe. Ma says it's well invested, and we
shall have four thousand a year each. Goodness--goodness--goodness me!"

"I should like to fit up the old house and live there," said Mrs. Webb.
"But--yes--I should like to see Europe first. That was one of the dreams
of my youth."

"And I'll have a sealskin! At last! You shall have a magnificent black
silk and a pair of diamond earrings--"

"Polly!" exclaimed her mother, "what should I do with diamonds? A new
black silk--a rich one--yes, I shall like that. Poor Sandy!"

Andrew leaned forward and took the document and laid it on his knee. He
stroked it as tenderly as if it had been a woman's head and he another
man. There was no sentiment in his nature, although he was an admirer of
beauty--New York beauty. After a time he detached himself from his
thoughts and talked the matter over with his mother and sister. When
they asked him what he should do he replied, confusedly, that he did not
know. But the plans of neither were so well defined as his.

All that night he sat on the edge of his bed staring at the worn
outlines of the boy and the dog on the rug under his feet. Fifty
thousand dollars! It seemed a great fortune to him. Such a sum had been
familiar enough in figures for many years. But that it might represent a
concrete wad of bills was a fact which had never presented itself to his
imagination before. Fifty thousand dollars! He did not know what the
objects of his idolatry were worth, merely that they were idle and
luxurious. These fifty thousand dollars would enable him to be idle and
luxurious--and to meet society at last on its own ground.

IV

The interval between that night and the day upon which the estate was
settled, Andrew passed in a sort of impatient dream. Never before had
days, weeks, months seemed so long; never had he so dissociated himself
from his little world and melted into that luminous circle of which he
was to become a component pa