“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 part.  How he was to obtain his passport into fashionable society was a question that did not concern him.  Its portals were typified to him by the wide gates of Central Park, through which all might roll upon whom fortune smiled.  One blessed fact possessed his mind:  by the first of July he should be master of his future, liberated from his desk, free to go to Newport.  When his foot actually pressed that reservation, all the rest would come about quite naturally.  At this time he still preserved his self-respect.  He felt quite the equal of the men he had brushed elbows with at Delmonico’s—­the pink-faced youths with their butter-colored tops, the affable elderly men with their bulbous stomachs and puffy eyes.  And he had caught many of their