Teevan listened for the door to close on his guest. When he heard this he sank into his chair and chuckled gaspingly. Presently he drank a glass of brandy, smiled in remembering pleasure, lighted a cigarette, and took his post on the hearth rug, his eyes dancing elfishly, his lips moving. His son found him so an hour later, for the little man was tireless even when, lacking an audience, he merely dramatized his own reflections. Seeing him to be familiarly engaged, Alden Teevan would have withdrawn with a careless, half-contemptuous nod, but his father detained him with a gesture, and a sudden setting of his face into purposeful hardness. "Sit down." He looked into the hall, then closed the door and faced his son. The latter regarded him with coolly impertinent interest. "You'd make a ripping conspirator in a melodrama, Randy. What you going to do now--steal the will?" Teevan laughed grimly. He crossed back to the hearth rug and took a fresh cigarette, which he lighted with studious deliberation. His words followed swiftly upon the first exhalation of smoke, and his eyes fastened venomously on his son's. "I'll give you a morsel to jest with--conspirator, indeed!--yes, and a will. See if that facile wit of yours is up to it, my bonny stripling." He played with his moment, drawing on the cigarette with leisurely relish, and gazing into the smoke with eyes of an absorbed visionary. "Well?" The young man yawned ostentatiously. "You missed dining with your brother this evening. He was good enough to break bread at my table." The young man took a cigarette from the lacquered bowl at his side and lighted it with the same deliberation his father had shown. "Really? I didn't know you had another son." "Thank God I haven't--but your mother had, and that precious sniveling grandmother of yours has another grandson. You might recall that when you chatter of melodrama--and wills. I believe her estate is not one you'd care to divide." "What rot are you gibbering with those monkey airs of yours?" "Delicate as ever in your raillery! Perhaps you think I'm drunk. Perhaps I am. But I dropped in on your grandmother this afternoon in time to prevent her clasping that nameless whelp to her breast. A lovely bit I spoiled, my merry-andrew!--tears and fondlings to-night, a codicil to-morrow. I'm none too sure there'd have been a codicil, though. Likelier a new will--'give, devise, and bequeath the sum of one dollar to my grandson Alden Teevan, who has already wheedled me out of more than was good for him, and the residue of my estate, both real and personal, to my beloved grandson, Gilbert Denham Ewing----'" "Ewing! That chap Nell Laithe brought back with her--that rustic lout----"