Uncle Matthew Rouncivell was not of course so old as his relatives boasted that he was, but he was old enough to be considered incapable of lasting much longer and old enough to justify any member of the family in adding a few years to the correct total, which was seventy-six. He had been fifteen years younger than the wife of the Bishop of Clapham, and though he had scoffed at his sister for marrying a parson, he had to admit in the end that Andrew had made the most of a poor profession. Uncle Matthew's mean and acquisitive boyhood had been the consolation of his father's declining years, and he started life with a comfortable fortune notwithstanding what had been robbed from him as a dowry to marry off his sister. Their father, Samuel Rouncivell, had invested largely in property that seemed likely to put difficulties in the way of far-off municipal improvements, or as he preferred to put it, lay along the lines of future urban development. He and his son after him had a remarkable flair for buying up decrepit slums that would afterward turn out to be the only possible site for a new town hall or public library. And then the keen eye old Samuel had for the arteries of traffic! Why, it was as keen as an anatomist's for the arteries of the human body. In whatever direction tramlines or railroads desired to flow, there stood Samuel ready to apply his tourniquet, which was sometimes nothing more than one tumbledown cottage plastered with signs of ancient lights. This sense of direction was transmitted to Matthew, who when one of the big London termini had to be enlarged trebled his fortune at a stroke. Now, at seventy-six, he could not be worth less than fifteen thousand a year, and as he did not spend five hundred, every year he lived was making him wealthier. Long ago he had married a beautiful young woman who a few months later was killed in a riding accident. Since then he had spent a solitary and misanthropic life, grinding his tenants, amassing a quantity of unusual walking-sticks and bad modern pictures, and collecting what he called antiques. His only amusement was the malicious delight he took in leading the various groups of his relations to suppose one after another that he was contemplating them as his beneficiaries. Thin-lipped and beaky, he had a fat flabby back and pale flabby cheeks, and the skin of his neck was mottled and scaly as a snake's slough. He usually wore a frock-coat that resembled the green slime on London railings in wet weather; but when he dined out he took with him a black velvet smoking cap worked in arabesques of yellow silk and a pair of slippers made of leopard's fur to which moth had given a mangy appearance. He liked to dine early, and it was six o'clock of a fine evening in early May when he arrived at The Cedars, his frock-coat reinforced by a grey muffler long enough and thick enough to have kept a Zulu moderately warm at the North Pole. He did not seem in a good