Mr. Dinks stopped.  There were some papers annexed, containing directions for collecting the annuity to be paid to Mrs. Simcoe, and a schedule of the property.  The Honorable B. Dinks looked hastily at the schedule.

“Miss Wayne’s property will be at least a million of dollars,” said he, in a formal voice.

There were a few moments of utter silence.  Even the legal gentlemen ceased buzzing; but presently the forefinger of one of them was laid in the palm of his other hand, and as he stated his proposition to his neighbor, a light conversation began again.

Mrs. Fanny Dinks Newt seemed to have been smitten.  She sat crushed up, as it were, biting her nails nervously; her brow wrinkled incredulously, and glaring at her father-in-law, as he folded the paper.  Her face grew altogether as black as her hair and her eyes; as if she might discharge a frightful flash and burst of tempest if she were touched or spoken to, or even looked at.

But Mrs. Dinks the elder did look at her, not at all with an air of sullen triumph, but, on the contrary, with a singularly inquisitive glance of apprehension and alarm, as if she felt that the petty trial of wits between them was insignificant compared with the chances of Alfred’s happiness.  In one moment it flashed upon her mind that the consequences of this will to her Alfred—­to her son whom she loved—­would be overwhelming.  Good Heavens! she turned pale as she thought of him and Fanny together.

The young man had merely muttered “By Jove, that’s too d——­ bad!” and flung himself out of the room.

His wife did not observe that her mother-in-law was regarding her; she did not see that her husband had left the room; she thought of no contest of wits, of no game she had won or lost.  She thought only of the tragical mistake she had made—­the dull, blundering crime she had committed; and still bowed over, and gnawing her nails, she looked sideways with her hard, round, black eyes, at Hope Wayne.

The heiress sat quietly by the side of her friend Lawrence Newt.  She was holding the hand of Mrs. Simcoe, who glanced sometimes at Lawrence, calmly, and with no sign of regretful or revengeful remembrance.  The Honorable Budlong Dinks was walking up and down the room, stroking his chin with his hand, not without a curiously vague indignation with the late lamented proprietor of Pinewood.

It was a strange spectacle.  A room full of living men and women who had just heard what some of them considered their doom pronounced by a dead man.  They had carried him out of his house, cold, powerless, screwed into the casket.  They had laid him in the ground beneath the village spire, and yet it was his word that troubled, enraged, disappointed, surprised, and envenomed them.  Beyond their gratitude, reproaches, taunts, or fury, he lay helpless and dumb—­yet the most terrible and inaccessible of despots.