When the hard frost had broken, and the streets were full of slush and melting snow, Ada had to spend her five cents going in the Fifth Avenue stage-coach to and from her business, for, even with rubbers on, she had got her feet so wet and her skirts so destroyed that she found that it was in the end cheaper to drive than to walk. The children, too, had found it necessary to drive to school. Marjory had been very troublesome of late; she had been grumbling and repining at her restricted life, saying that she would rather make friends with the girls whom Ada considered vulgar and beneath her, than have such a dull, cheerless time. Ada had noticed that her eccentric old man had not been in the stage-coach for some time past, and she wondered what had become of him. She was sitting waiting for the boarding-house dinner-bell to ring (in the public sitting-room), when the fat lady, who took such an inquisitive interest in her and her little sisters, came in. “Well, Ada Nicoli,” she said in her rough friendly way, “don’t you wish you were the young lady.” “What young lady?” said Ada. The fat lady put the _New York Herald_ down on Ada’s lap. “Read it,” she said. “It’s the maddest thing you ever heard. The crazy old man whom you’ve often seen in the Fifth Avenue stage-coach, and who ate his bit of bread and cheese every day on the public seat in Madison Square, and looked as poor as any tramp, died a week ago.” “Oh,” said Ada regretfully; “is he dead?” She had grown to look upon him as one of her friends in the big cruel city, and now he had gone too. “Yes, he’s dead,” the fat woman said emphatically; “and he’s left a mighty pile of dollars behind him. He used to stint himself of house-fuel, and go to bed whenever he got home from business on a winter’s day to save light, and wore clothes a coloured man wouldn’t give to his father. What’s the use of saving like that if you’re going to leave all your fortune to a total stranger.” “Poor old man,” the girl said; “he was really rather mad, but somehow I liked him; he seemed to belong more to the last century than to this.” “Well, it appears he’s left every dollar he’s got to some girl that he thought deserved some money, a milliner’s girl, the papers say, who once saved his life in a snowstorm or something like that.” Ada read the long and highly-dramatic account of the old man’s curious will. “Yes, I wish I were the girl,” she said; “but I fear there’s no fairy prince in disguise watching my poor trivial round and common task. But just fancy, a girl earning her own living suddenly to find herself an heiress!” The boarding-house bell sounded, and the hungry children came bounding down to dinner. “Ada,” whispered Marjory at table, “a man came to see you this morning, and I said you were out. He asked me a lot of questions, and I answered before I remembered that perhaps you would rather I didn’t.”