When the service was over and the bishop had spoken some beautiful impressive words, during the delivery of which everyone present looked rapt and divided between ecstasy and anguish (Katherine alone having her usual expression of reserve and indifference), all the mourners and officials flocked across the park to the great house to enjoy, in their several places, according to their rank, the magnificent luncheon which was destined to be the last effort of Richemont in the Massarene service. Katherine and her mother were, during the banqueting, closeted with the solicitors and administrators to hear the reading of the will. The executors were two solid and sagacious city magnates, for in business matters the testator had only trusted business-men. His daughter was undisturbed; she felt quite certain that he would have disinherited her. He would, she felt sure, have disposed of his millions in some splendid, public, and sensational way. His widow was visibly nervous and anxious. “I never saw an inch into his mind in this matter,” she thought. “’Tis quite likely as he’ll cut us both off with a shilling.” To dispute his will, whatever it might be, never occurred as possible to one who had been his obedient slave nigh forty years. She listened in strained and painful attention as she sat in the library with her daughter, and the great London solicitor, who had been the person chiefly trusted by Massarene, opened the momentous document and laid it before him, and, resting his hand upon it, said to the two women: “My dear ladies, there is no later will than that made ten years ago, which, with your permission, I will now proceed to read to you. It is to be presumed that the deceased always remained in the same dispositions of mind and feeling, since he has never even added a codicil to this document.” With that preamble he turned toward the light and read aloud a testament of much simplicity considering the enormous fortune of which it disposed. It left everything unreservedly to his only child, Katherine Massarene, and provided only that she should pay to her mother the annual sum of a thousand pounds a year. It left nothing whatever directly to his wife, not even jewels, and with the exception of a few bequests to hospitals and executors, provided for nothing else than the transmission of his entire property to his daughter, for her own absolute and unrestricted possession on the attainment of her majority: that age she had now passed by four years.