kings of Almighty God.”  And from this interesting premise the Reverend Wilmot deduced the divine intent that the “best blood” should have superior rights—­leadership, respect, deference.  So dear was he to his flock that they made him rich in this world’s goods as well as in love and honor.  The Wilmots of Saint X had had lively expectations from his estate.  They thought that one holding the views eloquently set forth in “The Badge of Birth” must dedicate his fortune to restoring the dignity and splendor of the main branch of the Wilmot family.  But, like all their dreams, this came to naught.  His fortune went to a theological seminary to endow scholarships and fellowships for decayed gentlemen’s sons; he remembered only Verbena Wilmot.  On his one visit to the crumbling, weed-choked seat of the head of the house, he had seen Verbena’s wonderful hands, so precious and so useless that had she possessed rings and deigned to wear them she would not have permitted the fingers of the one hand to put them on the fingers of the other.  The legacy was five thousand dollars, at four per cent., an income of two hundred dollars a year.  Verbena invested the first quarterly installment in a long-dreamed-of marble reproduction of her right hand which, after years of thinking daily about the matter, she had decided was a shade more perfect than the left.

If one dim eye makes a man king among blind men—­to translate to the vernacular Verbena’s elegant reasoning—­an income, however trifling, if it have no taint of toil, no stench of sweat upon it, makes its possessor entitled to royal consideration in a family of paupers and dead beats, degraded by harboring a breadwinner of an Estelle.  No sudden recipient of a dazzling, drenching shower of wealth was ever more exalted than was Verbena, once in possession of “my legacy.”  Until the Rev. Eliot Wilmot’s posthumous blessing descended upon her, the Wilmots lived together in comparative peace and loving kindness.  They were all, except for their mania of genealogy, good-humored, extremely well-mannered people, courteous as much by nature as by deliberate intent.  But, with the coming of the blessing, peace and friendliness in that family were at an end.  Old Preston Wilmot and Arden railed unceasingly against the “traitor” Eliot; Verbena defended him.  Their mother and Estelle were drawn into the battle from time to time, Estelle always against her will.  Before Verbena had been a woman of property three months, she was hating her father and brother for their sneers and insults, Arden had gone back to drinking, and the old gentleman was in a savage and most ungentlemanly humor from morning until night.