“I think,”--he said, half aloud,--“I think the time is ripe for a Peerage! I can spare--now, let me see!--yes!--I can spare the money! Twenty thousand pounds to a hospital will almost do it! And perhaps another twenty thousand in some more private quarter, and,--a little diplomacy!” He sniggered softly and rubbed his hands. “Lord McNason will sound well,--very well! If my son had lived----” Here the heavy frown again made an abyss of his brow. He stared into the fire with a kind of melancholy sullenness, and began to think. His thinking was half involuntary, for he was not a man who cared to dwell on memories of the past or possibilities of the present. Yet, despite himself, he found his mind wandering through various byways of reminiscence back to the time when he was young, with all the world before him,--when, through the crafty instruction of an over-moneyed American capitalist he had learned by heart that celebrated paraphrase of a well-known divine text--“‘Do’ others as you would not be ‘done.’” He saw himself practically adopting this rule of life and conduct with brilliant results. He traced the beginning of the great inflow of gold which now encrusted him and rolled him up as it were in a yellow metallic shroud, a singular and separate creature, apart from other men. He recalled against his own will an incident in his career which he would fain have forgotten, when at about thirty-seven years of age he had won the first affections of a sweet and beautiful girl of seventeen whom afterwards he had heartlessly jilted, for no fault of her own, but merely because her father had through sad mischance suddenly lost his fortune. Then,--his mind persisting in its abnormal humour of harking back like a hunted hare to old covers,--he reviewed the circumstances of his loveless marriage with the daughter of a millionaire who was at that time half as rich again as himself,--and even now, though she was dead, it was not without a sense of angry pique and nervous irritation that he remembered her utter callousness and indifference to his personality,--her light regard for his wealth, which she scattered recklessly on every sort of foolish extravagance and dissipation,--and her want of natural care and affection for the one child which she gave him,--a promising boy on whom he lavished what infinitesimal vestiges of love still remained in his rapidly fossilizing moral composition. He thought of all the anxiety and cost which the education of this, his sole heir, had entailed upon him,--anxiety which was futile, and cost which was wasted. For Death cannot be bribed off by bullion. Typhoid fever in its most virulent form had snatched away the boy when he was barely eleven years old, and though the piles of gold still continued to accumulate and ever accumulate with the workings of the great McNason firm, there was no one to inherit the monster millions that came to birth with every fresh turn of the business wheel.