No, the boy never came, because he was what the old man had made him—­headstrong, and wilful, and obstinate.  Billy had been thoroughly spoiled.  The old man had nurtured his pride, had applauded it as a mark of proper spirit; and now it was this same pride that had robbed him of the one thing he loved in all the world.

So, at last, the weak point in the armour of this sturdy old Pharisee was found, and Fate had pierced it gaily.  It was retribution, if you will; and I think that none of his victims in “the Street,” none of the countless widows and orphans that he had made, suffered more bitterly than he in those last days.

It was almost two years after Billy’s departure from Selwoode that his body-servant, coming to rouse Frederick R. Woods one June morning, found him dead in his rooms.  He had been ailing for some time.  It was his heart, the doctors said; and I think that it was, though not precisely in the sense which they meant.

The man found him seated before his great carved desk, on which his head and shoulders had fallen forward; they rested on a sheet of legal-cap paper half-covered with a calculation in his crabbed old hand as to the value of certain properties—­the calculation which he never finished; and underneath was a mass of miscellaneous papers, among them his will, dated the day after Billy left Selwoode, in which Frederick R. Woods bequeathed his millions unconditionally to Margaret Hugonin when she should come of age.

Her twenty-first birthday had fallen in the preceding month.  So Margaret was one of the richest women in America; and you may depend upon it, that if many men had loved her before, they worshipped her now—­or, at least, said they did, and, after all, their protestations were the only means she had of judging.  She might have been a countess—­and it must be owned that the old Colonel, who had an honest Anglo-Saxon reverence for a title, saw this chance lost wistfully—­and she might have married any number of grammarless gentlemen, personally unknown to her, whose fervent proposals almost every mail brought in; and besides these, there were many others, more orthodox in their wooing, some of whom were genuinely in love with Margaret Hugonin, and some—­I grieve to admit it—­who were genuinely in love with her money; and she would have none of them.

She refused them all with the utmost civility, as I happen to know.  How I learned it is no affair of yours.

For Miss Hugonin had remarkably keen eyes, which she used to advantage.  In the world about her they discovered very little that she could admire.  She was none the happier for her wealth; the piled-up millions overshadowed her personality; and it was not long before she knew that most people regarded her simply as the heiress of the Woods fortune—­an unavoidable encumbrance attached to the property, which divers thrifty-minded gentlemen were willing to put up with.  To put up with!—­at the thought, her pride rose in a hot blush, and, it must be confessed, she sought consolation in the looking-glass.