Another cause of misery was the fact that his father’s death in leaving him alone had also thrown him upon his own resources.  Now he would have to shoulder responsibilities which hitherto his father had assumed, and decide questions which until now his father had answered.

However, he felt that his father’s death had sobered him as nothing else, not even Ida’s suicide, had done.  The time was come at length for him to take life seriously.  He would settle down now to work at his art.  He would go to Paris as his father had wished, and devote himself earnestly to painting.  Yes, the time was come for him to steady himself, and give over the vicious life into which he had been drifting.

But it was not long before Vandover had become accustomed to his father’s death, and had again rearranged himself to suit the new environment which it had occasioned.  He wondered at himself because of the quickness with which he had recovered from this grief, just as before he had marvelled at the ease with which he had forgotten Ida’s death.  Could it be true, then, that nothing affected him very deeply?  Was his nature shallow?

However, he was wrong in this respect; his nature was not shallow.  It had merely become deteriorated.

Two days after his father’s death Vandover went into the Old Gentleman’s room to get a certain high-backed chair which had been moved there from his own room during the confusion of the funeral, and which, pending the arrival of the trestles, had been used to support the coffin.

As he was carrying it back his eye fell upon a little heap of objects carefully set down upon the bureau.  They were the contents of the Old Gentleman’s pockets that the undertaker had removed when the body was dressed for burial.

Vandover turned them over, sadly interested in them.  There was the watch, some old business letters and envelopes covered with memoranda, his fountain-pen, a couple of cigars, a bank-book, a small amount of change, his pen-knife, and one or two tablets of chewing-gum.

Vandover thrust the pen and the knife into his own pocket.  The bank-book, letters, and change he laid away in his father’s desk, but the cigars and the tablets of gum, together with the crumpled pocket-handkerchief that he found on another part of the dressing-case, he put into the Old Gentleman’s hat, which he had hidden on the top shelf of his clothes closet.  The watch he hung upon a little brass thermometer that always stood on his centre table.  He even wound up the watch with the resolve never to let it run down so long as he should live.

The keys, however, disturbed him, and he kept changing them from one hand to the other, looking at them very thoughtfully.  They suggested to him the inquiry as to whether or no his father had made a will, and how much money he, Vandover, could now command.  One of the keys was a long brass key.  Vandover knew that this unlocked a little iron box that from time out of mind had been screwed upon the lower shelf of the clothes closet in his father’s room.  It was in this box that the Old Gentleman kept his ready money and a few important papers.