Well, life was like that. When he had built his two great houses he had thought they would prove an immense satisfaction to him, as they had for a time; but he would not be here much longer now to enjoy them. He wasn’t nearly as active as he had been, and the sight of the large companies of people that came to pose and say silly things to each other was very wearying. They were always civil to him, of course, but little more. They wanted the influence of his name. And as long as he permitted it, his homes would be haunted by those who wished to sell him things—stocks, bonds, enterprises, tapestries, estates, horses. And those two boys of hers, along with Nadia herself where her so-called art objects were concerned, so busy encouraging them! Well, he was done with all that now. He would not be bothered. Even youth and beauty of a venal character had appeared on the scene and had attempted to set traps for him. But his day was over. All these fripperies and pleasures were for people younger than he. It required youth and energy to see beauty and romance in such things, and he hadn’t a trace of either left. His day was over and he might as well die, really, for all the good he was, apart from his money, to any one. V The reminiscences of Byington Briggs, Esq., of Skeff, Briggs & Waterhouse, private legal advisers to the late J. H. Osterman, as developed in a private conversation at the Metropolitan Club in New York in December, 19—. “You knew old Osterman, didn’t you? I was his confidential adviser for the last eight years of his life, and a shrewder old hawk never sailed the air. He was a curious combination of speculator, financier and dreamer, with a high percentage of sharper thrown in for good measure. You’d never imagine that he was charitably inclined, now would you? It never occurred to me until about a year and a half before his death. I have never been able to explain it except that as a boy he had had a very hard time and in his old age resented seeing his two stepsons, Kester and Rand Benda, getting ready to make free use of his fortune once he was gone. And then I think he had come to believe that his wife was merely using him to feather her own nest. I wouldn’t want it mentioned to a soul as coming from me, but three months before he died he had me draw up a will leaving his entire estate of something like forty millions, not to her, as the earlier will filed by her showed, but to the J. H. Osterman Foundation, a corporation whose sole purpose was to administer his fortune for the benefit of something like three hundred thousand orphans incarcerated in institutions in America. And but for the accident of his sudden death out there at Shell Cove two years ago, he would have left it that way.