Mr. Trevor was sixty-five when the idea of making his will occurred to him first. Not that he had left Lucy’s fortune in any doubt up to that moment. A brief and concise little document existed in his lawyer’s hands, putting her rights entirely beyond question; but it was years after the making of this first will that the idea occurred to him of shaping out Lucy’s life for her, and settling the course of years after he should have himself passed from the conduct of affairs. He was a man who had lived a very matter-of-fact life; but John Trevor was not a man without imagination. Even in the days when he had least time for such vanities, there had been gleams of fancy about him, and he had always been fond of entering into the circumstances of his pupils, and giving them his advice. They all knew that to have his advice asked was a thing that pleased him. And the management of a great fortune excites the mind and draws forth the imagination. He had to throw himself into all the combinations of speculative money-making, the romance of shares and coupons; and had acquired a sort of divination, a spirit of prophecy, a power of seeing what was about to pay or not to pay. Some men have this power by nature, but few acquire it; and no doubt it had lain dormant in John Trevor all the years during which, having no money to invest, he had not cared to exercise his faculties as to the best investment. When, however, he had made many very successful _coups_, and eluded many stumbles, and steered triumphantly through some dangers, a sense of his own cleverness and power stole into his heart. He felt that he was a man with great powers of administration, and instincts which it was a thousand pities not to make use of; and it suddenly came into his mind one evening, when he had just added several thousand pounds to Lucy’s fortune by a very successful and clever operation, that he might exercise these powers in a still more effectual way. Ah! if Lucy’s fortune had been a poor little trumpery bit of a fortune, not enough for the girl to live on, it would not have increased like this, it would never have doubled itself, as old Trevor’s money did! Even Providence seemed in the compact, and gave the advantage to the heiress, just as the richer people of the Rainy kindred did, who gave her their money because she had so much already. But this is a digression. As Mr. Trevor thought over the whole question--and naturally Lucy’s fortune, which was his chief occupation, was also the thing that took up most of his thoughts--he could not but feel a vivid regret that it would be impossible to outlive his own ending, and see how the money throve in Lucy’s hands. This seems a whimsical regret, but it is not an unnatural one. Could we only keep a share of what is going on, could we but be sure of seeing our ideas carried out, and assisting at our own dying and burying, and all that would follow after, death would be a much less dismal matter.