“According to the terms of the will that I drew up, Mrs. Osterman and her two sons were to receive only the interest on certain bonds that were to be placed in trust for them for their lifetime only; after that the money was to revert to the fund. That would have netted them between forty and fifty thousand a year among them—nothing more. In the will I drew up he left $500,000 outright to that Gratiot Home for Orphans up here at 68th Street, and he intended his big country place at Shell Cove as the central unit in a chain of modern local asylums for orphans that was to have belted America. The income from the property managed by the foundation was to have been devoted to this work exclusively, and the Gratiot institution was to have been the New York branch of the system. His wife has leased the Shell Cove place to the Gerbermanns this year, I see, and a wonderful place it is too, solid marble throughout, a lake a mile long, a big sunken garden, a wonderful glassed-in conservatory, and as fine a view of the sea as you’ll find anywhere. Yet she never knew until the very last hour of his life—the very last, for I was there—that he planned to cut her off with only forty or fifty thousand a year. If we weren’t all such close friends I wouldn’t think of mentioning it even now, although I understand that Klippert, who was his agent in the orphan project, has been telling the story. It was this way: “You see, I was his lawyer, and had been ever since the K. B. & B. control fight in 1906, and the old man liked me—I don’t know why unless it was because I drew up the right sort of ‘waterproof contracts,’ as he always called them. Anyway, I knew six or seven years before he died that he wasn’t getting along so well with Mrs. Osterman. She is still an attractive woman, with plenty of brain power and taste, but I think he had concluded that she was using him and that he wasn’t as happy as he thought he would be. For one thing, as I gathered from one person and another, she was much too devoted to those two boys by her first husband, and in the next place I think he felt that she was letting that architect D’Eyraud lead her about too much and spend too much of his money. You know it was common rumor at the time that D’Eyraud and his friend Beseroe, another man the old captain disliked, were behind her in all her selections of pictures for the gallery she was bringing together up there in the Fifth Avenue place. Osterman, of course, knowing absolutely nothing about art, was completely out of it. He wouldn’t have known a fine painting from a good lithograph, and I don’t think he cared very much either. And yet it was a painting that was one of the causes of some feeling between them, as I will show you. At that time he looked mighty lonely and forlorn to me, as though he didn’t have a friend in the world outside of those business associates and employés of his. He stayed principally in that big town house, and Mrs. Benda—I mean Mrs.