Hiram smiled.  All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to “fool ’em again.”  He had been dying for three years.  At the first news that he was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its favor.  He lingered on, and so did they—­watching each other, trying to outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser.  And he got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house.  He favored first one group, then another, taking fagots from fires of hope burning too high to rekindle fires about to expire.

“How is he?” asked Hiram.

“They say he can’t last till fall,” replied Henrietta; “but he’ll last another winter, maybe ten.  He’s having more and more fun all the time.  He has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he happens to be sleeping badly—­and that’s pretty often—­he bangs on the anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then, maybe he’ll set ’em all to work mending his fishing tackle—­right in the dead of night.”

“Are they all there still?” asked Hiram.  “The Thomases, the Wilsons, the Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?”

“Everyone—­except Miss Frisbie.  She’s gone back home to Rushville, but she’s sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow.  I saw Dory Hargrave in the street a while ago.  You know his mother was a first cousin of old John’s.  I told him he ought not to let strangers get the old man’s money, that he ought to shy his castor into the ring.”

“And what did Dory say?” asked Hiram.

“He came back at me good and hard,” said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored laugh.  “He said there’d been enough people in Saint X ruined by inheritances and by expecting inheritances.  You know the creek that flows through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the reservoir.  Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it.”

The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over the other—­a certain sign that he was thinking intently.

“There’s a good deal of truth in what he said,” she went on.  “Look at our family, for instance.  We’ve been living on an allowance from Grandfather Fuller in Chicago for forty years.  None of us has ever done a stroke of work; we’ve simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his millions.  Look at us!  Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep alive.  Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our family they began to loaf and wait.  We’ve been waiting in decent, or I should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we’re still waiting.  We’re a lot of paupers.  We’re on a level with the Wilmots.”