"I did not dare to do so," Eugene replied, that line of weakness in his face which Jerry had noted three years before revealing itself for the first time to her aunt. "This is sufficient," she said, in a quiet sort of way. "To-morrow I make my will--just to be sure. I shall probably outlive many younger people than myself. Write and tell Jerry I have done it. This time to-morrow night will see my estate settled so far as the next generation is concerned. If I do not do it, Eugene, some distant and improvident relatives of Cornelius will claim it. Send the lawyer out in the morning." "All right, Aunt Jerry. I must go now. I have a club meeting in the city and I can make it easily. The car runs like the wind with Henderson at the wheel. Good-by." And Eugene Wellington was gone. "Three years ago I'd have left everything to him if I had been ready to make a will then. I'm ready now, and any time in the next ten years I can change it if I want to. But this will bring things my way, after all. I told York I'd never forgive Jerry!" Mrs. Darby paused, and a smile lighted her wrinkled face. "To think of that girl just shouldering her burden and walking off with it. If she isn't Brother Jim over again! Never writing a word of complaint. Oh, Jerry! Jerry! I'll make it up to you to-morrow." To Jerusha Darby money made up for everything. She sat long in the rose-arbor, thinking, maybe, of the years when Jerry's children and her children's children would dominate the Winnowoc countryside as they of the Swaim blood had always done. And then, because she was tired, and the afternoon sunshine was warm, and her willow rocking-chair was very comfortable--she fell asleep. <tb> "Went just like her brother, the late Jeremiah Swaim," the papers said, the next evening. Instead of the lawyer, it was the undertaker who came to officiate. And the last will and testament, and the too-late evidence of a forgiving good-will, all were impossible henceforth and forever. The estate of the late Jerusha Darby, relict of the late Cornelius Darby, no will of hers having been found, passed, by agreement under law, to a distant relative of the late Cornelius, which relative being Eugene Wellington, whose knowledge of the said possible conditions of inheritance he had held in his possession for three years, since the day he accidentally found them among the private papers of his late uncle, knowing the while that any sudden notion of the late Jerusha might result in putting her possessions, by her own signature, where neither Jerry, as her favorite and heir apparent, nor himself, as heir-in-law without a will, could inherit anything. Truly Gene had had a bothersome time of it for three years, and he congratulated himself on having done well--excellently well, indeed. Truly only the good little snakes ever entered that "Eden" in the Winnowoc Valley in Pennsylvania. XVII THE FLESH-POTS OF THE WINNOWOC