To be sure, in most cases the penalty of this post-mortem spectatorship would be that we should not see our ideas carried out at all. But this was not what Mr. Trevor looked forward to. He would have been quite content to give up his share in the world, if he could only have kept an eye on the course of events afterward, and retained some power of suggesting, at least, what ought to be done. But even under the most favorable view, the hereafter for which we hope was not likely, Mr. Trevor felt, to permit any active intervention of the disembodied spirit in the matter of stocks or shares. And it was a painful check to him to feel that, in a few years at the most, Lucy’s property and herself would be deprived of the invaluable guidance which his own experience and intelligence would give. It was while this regret was heavy upon him that the idea of making a will suddenly occurred to him--not the ordinary sort of will, a thing which, as already indicated, was made long ago, but a potential and living instrument, by which out of his grave he would still be able to look after the affairs which had cost him so much trouble, and which had so prospered in his hands. The idea stirred him with the liveliest thrill of pleasure. He began the document the very next day, after laying in a stock of paper, large blue folio, lined and crackling, that the very outward form might be absolutely correct. And it was a very remarkable document; it was the romance, the poem of John Trevor’s life. Sitting by himself among his coupons and account books, he had evolved out of his own consciousness, bit by bit, the ideal of a millionaire--nay, of a female millionaire--of an heiress, not in her usual aspect as the prey of fortune-hunters, pursued for love, not of herself, but of her money. The sentimental side of the question did not touch old Trevor at all. He thought of his daughter from a very different point of view. If he ever reflected upon a possible husband for her, it was with great impatience and distaste of the idea. He would rather, if he could, have settled for her that she should never marry. He wanted her to be herself, and not anybody’s wife. All his calculations were for her as she was, Lucy Trevor, not for Mrs. So-and-so. It seemed to him that the woman who would take up his sketch of existence and carry it out, would be something much more worth thinking of than a married lady of the ordinary level. She would be a very important person indeed, in her father’s sketch of her, making what he intended to be a very fine use of her money, and living for that end like a princess. He did not cut off any portion of her duties, because she was a woman; indeed he thought no more of that fact than in so far as it was this which gave him his chief certainty of being able to mold her, and make her life what he wished. He would not, probably, have thought it worth his while to take so much trouble had she been a boy;