t he wanted more than anything else. Good luck to you!" he said again
and turned away....

When John Grier's will was published in the Press consternation filled
the minds of all. Tarboe had been in the business for under two years,
yet here he was left all the property with uncontracted power. Mrs. John
Grier was to be paid during her life a yearly stipend of twenty thousand
dollars from the business; she also received a grant of seventy thousand
dollars. Beyond that, there were a few gifts to hospitals and for the
protection of horses, while to the clergyman of the parish went one
thousand dollars. It certainly could not be called a popular will, and,
complimentary as the newspapers were to the energy and success of John
Grier, few of them called him public-spirited, or a generous-hearted
citizen. In his death he paid the price of his egotism.

The most surprised person, however, was Junia Shale.

To her it was shameful that Carnac should be eliminated from all share
in the abundant fortune John Grier had built up. It seemed fantastic
that the fortune and the business--and the business was the
fortune--should be left to Tarboe. Had she known the contents of the
will before John Grier was buried, she would not have gone to the
funeral. Egotistic she had known Grier to be, and she imagined the will
to be a sudden result of anger. He was dead and buried. The places
that knew him knew him no more. All in an hour, as it were, the man
Tarboe--that dominant, resourceful figure--had come into wealth and
power.

After Junia read the substance of the will, she went springing up the
mountain-side, as it were to work off her excitement by fatigue. At the
mountain-top she gazed over the River St. Lawrence with an eye blind
to all except this terrible distortion of life. Yet through her
obfuscation, there ran admiration for Tarboe. What a man he was! He
had captured John Grier as quickly and as securely as a night fisherman
spears a sturgeon in the flare at the bow of the boat. Tarboe's ability
was as marked as John Grier's mad policy. It was strange that Tarboe
should have bewildered and bamboozled--if that word could be used--the
old millowner. It was as curious and thrilling as John Grier's
fanaticism.

Already the pinch of corruption had nipped his flesh; he was useless,
motionless in his narrow house, and yet, unseen but powerful, his
influence went on. It shamed a wife and son; it blackened the doors of a
home; it penal