Those who had never before heard of Sir Aylmer Lancing or of Deryk are no more likely than I am to forget the excitement of the week that followed Raymond Stornaway’s death. That it lasted no more than a week was due to the number of competing claims on the public attention; but, between the Bloomsbury cocaine-prosecution and the Dawlish murder, half the papers were calling O’Rane’s heritage “romantic” and the other half “sensational”, while the conversation at every dinner-party that I attended came by divers ways to the unanimous conclusion that Sonia would now spend twelve hundred thousand pounds a year on feeding her friends. Before she had recovered from her first shock, I observed that she was considering bigger houses in other parts of London; on the morrow, when I dined—for the last time, as I vowed to myself—in Rutland Gate, Lady Dainton told me that she had never entertained any idea of selling Crowley Court; and, when I visited O’Rane to enquire if he needed help, he shewed me a pile, waist-high, of begging letters. 2 It was my first visit to the offices of the Lancing Trust; and I retain the memory of a vast, wind-swept barn on the edge of Hampstead Heath, with an old red-brick cottage and pent-houses of tarred wood attached. There were a great many box-files, a gigantic set of loose-leaf ledgers, a fair-sized reference library and a large number of typewriters. On one wall I recognized the map which Aylmer Lancing used to keep in his study to remind him of the stages by which his grip had spread over the earth’s surface. In all other respects, the building might have belonged to a poor-law relieving-officer; and Sonia, who obviously expected to find a double row of bankers smoking long cigars at a gleaming mahogany table, was no less obviously disappointed. “I came to see if I could help you in any way,” I told O’Rane, who had rather frightened me the night before by his air of physical exhaustion. We found him now with one of his secretaries in Raymond Stornaway’s private office, fidgeting with the will. I learned that the money was to be spent “for the good of humanity”; and in the construction of that clause he had already received so much contradictory advice that he had closed his office to chance callers. “I didn’t expect Stornaway to die so soon,” was all he would say when I asked him his plans. “I doubt if time will make your problem any easier,” I answered, as I joined Sonia in front of the tattered wall-map. There, from the centre of what Lancing had bought as a burnt-out town-site, the Lancing influence spread in extending circles. A name and date in faded ink marked the advance of his railroads, the acquisition of his forests and mines, the linking of lake to ocean for the transportation of his grain. Dotted lines, leading to vague infinity, shewed where Lancing had splashed out of the union into the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.