Hamilton Burton was gone and his parasites were withering.  His will provided a princely fortune for each member of his family—­save his sister, for whom they would care.  But a will presupposes an estate—­here were only enormous liabilities and vanished assets.

This man’s dream of power in a single hand—­the hand that could produce—­had held so firm that he had never made any provision for their independent fortunes while he lived and held at his finger ends the touch of Midas.

Now he was dead.  The coroner said, after viewing the evidence, he had killed Haswell first and himself next—­so they added to all the sins of his overcharged account the crowning infamy of murder.

Those men who gather and print news have their fingers on the pulse-beat of things and sometimes they develop an occult sense of prophecy.

On the night of Hamilton’s death, as a certain city editor in Park row read the proof of the “day’s story,” he called one of his reporters to his desk and let him wait there while he himself rapidly penciled out the “Stud-horse head” which should, tomorrow morning, shock many breakfast-tables.  Finally he glanced up, under a green eye-shade, and shifted his dead cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

“Smitherton,” he instructed, “from now on keep right after the Burton story.”

Smitherton rolled a cigarette.  “The follow-up tomorrow will be a big one, too,” he prophesied.

“Sure, but I’m not only talking about the follow-up.  As to that you handle the introduction and general.  I’ll have the various other ends covered.  I refer to next week and next month and next year—­”

The staff man raised his brows, and, with an impatient and wearied growl, his chief commented curtly:  “Go, look up the word ‘parasite’ in the dictionary.  Maybe after that research you’ll understand better what I mean.  There’s copy in this for a long while.  The branch is dead and the leaves will be dropping.”

The stunned parents, the ashen-lipped brother and the sister, not yet recovered from her collapse, had months for realization; nightmare months during which hordes of creditors arose with legitimate, but wolf-like, hunger from everywhere, and courts adjudicated and the world learned that not a remnant of shredded fortune nor a ragged banknote would remain to the family which had dazzled New York since its Monte Cristo star rose on the horizon.

While the wolves were picking the remains of the estate to its naked bones, old Thomas Burton still went occasionally to his place in the club and gazed out of the Fifth-avenue window.  He wore a band of crepe around his sleeve, and a defiant glint in his eyes, and since he was left much to himself, he drank alone.  He was no longer the same portly and immaculately fashionable man.  His flesh had shrunk until his clothes hung upon him in misfit.  His face was seamed and his hair instead of being gray and smooth was white and stringy.  But no pride is so inflexible as acquired pride, so he came to the club where he was snubbed, because, “By Gad, sir, I have the right to come here.  I am Thomas Standish Burton, and I will not permit myself to be driven away—­even though adversities have befallen me!”