No, the sting concerning which Dr. Gonfallon had inquired was to Mistrial undiscerned. There was indeed a prick of it in the knowledge that if the old man had lasted much longer it might have been tough work to settle the bills; but that was gone now: Honest Paul paid all his debts, and he had not shirked at Nature's due. He was safely and securely dead, six feet under ground at that, and his millions were absolute in his grandson. Yes, absolute. At the thought of it Mistrial laughed. The goal to which for years he had striven was touched and exceeded. He had thrown the vitriol, the opopanax was his. We all of us pretend to forgive, to overlook, to condone, we pretend even to sympathize with, our enemy. Nay, in refraining from an act that could injure him who has injured us, we are quite apt to consider ourselves the superior of our foe, and not a little inclined to rise to the heights of self-laudatory quotation too. It is an antique virtue, that of forbearance; it is Biblical, nobly Arthurian, and chivalresque. But when we smile at an injury, it is for policy's sake--because we fear, rarely because we truly forgive, more rarely yet because of indifference. Our magnanimity is cowardice. It takes a brave man to wreak a brave revenge. Mistrial made few pretensions to the virtues which you and I possess. He was relentless as a Sioux, and he was treacherous as the savage is; he had no taste for fair and open fight. However his blood had boiled at the tableau of imaginary wrongs, however fitting the opportunity might have been on the afternoon when he met his enemy at the city's fringe, he had the desire but not the courage to annihilate him there. But later, when the possibility which he had intercepted came, he feted, he coaxed it; and now that the hour of triumph had rung, his heart was glad. In the disordered closets of his brain he saw Thorold ravening at the trap into which he had fallen, and into which, in falling, he had lost the wherewithal to call the world his own. Ten million in exchange for an embrace! Verily, mused Mistrial, he will account it exceeding dear. And at the thought of what Thorold's frenzy must be, at the picture which he drew of him cursing his own imprudence and telling himself again and again, until the repetition turned into mania, that that imprudence could never be undone, he exulted and laughed aloud. Money, said Vespasian, has no odor. To our acuter nostrils it has: so nauseating even can it be, that we would rather be flung in the Potter's-field than catch the faintest whiff. But Mistrial, for all the sensitiveness that ancestry is supposed to bring, must have agreed with the Roman. To him it was the woof of every hope; whatever its provenance, it was an Open Sesame to the paradise of the ideal. He would have drawn it with his teeth from a dung-heap, only he would have done it at night.