“Then it can’t be voted at all.” “Well,” said John, rising, “I guess I understand. How soon shall we be able to get the will proved?” “If everything goes smoothly,” said the Judge, “that is, if there is no contest and no irregularity of any sort, we should be able to prove it in a week or two.” “There will be no contest, I imagine,” said John. “Good day.” As the door closed behind John, Judge Hayes swung back to his desk, put his elbows on it, and his chin on his hands, and for the next ten minutes he meditated upon the attainments and the prospects of the man who had just left him. For the past half hour he had tried all that long experience and a fertile mind could suggest to tear off what he felt to be John’s mask of indifference. He knew what a blow that will must be, and he wanted to see how the real man, the man inside the shell, was taking it. He felt sure that the composure was a veneer, and he had done his best to rasp through it. “Well,” he concluded, as he reluctantly turned to something else, “the coating is laid on confounded thick.” As for John, he was walking swiftly up the street with the unmistakable air of a man who is about to attempt something, and intends to succeed in it. And yet, to all appearances, the situation was hopeless. His father had held a majority of the stock in the bank; the rest was in the hands of investors who had been attracted by the eminent respectability and conservatism of the policy the old man had established, and it was not likely they would look with favor on anything in the way of a change. And the three trustees whom old Mr. Bagsbury had selected were men after his own heart, crusty, obstinate, timorous. They controlled John’s stock--a majority of all the stock of the bank--as absolutely as if they were the joint owners of it. But an ironical providence has ordained that excessive caution shall often overreach itself, and the old man’s attempt to make safer what was already safe, gave John his opportunity. Had there been but one trustee, John’s case would indeed have been hopeless; but old Mr. Bagsbury, finding it impossible to trust any one man utterly, had trusted three. In a flash of intuition John had seen his chance and had asked Judge Hayes the question, whose significance the lawyer had failed to grasp, even as he answered it. As John walked along the street he smiled over a proverb which was running in his head. Doubtless it was a wild injustice to think of three blameless old men as rogues, but in their falling out lay John’s hope of coming into his own. For if the trustees should disagree as to the way his stock should be voted at the annual meeting, it could not be voted at all; and if John and his friends could get control of more than half the stock now in the hands of outsiders, he could put himself where he knew he belonged, at the head of Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank.