ged himself to suit the new
environment which it had occasioned. He wondered at himself because of
the quickness with which he had recovered from this grief, just as
before he had marvelled at the ease with which he had forgotten Ida's
death. Could it be true, then, that nothing affected him very deeply?
Was his nature shallow?

However, he was wrong in this respect; his nature was not shallow. It
had merely become deteriorated.

Two days after his father's death Vandover went into the Old Gentleman's
room to get a certain high-backed chair which had been moved there from
his own room during the confusion of the funeral, and which, pending
the arrival of the trestles, had been used to support the coffin.

As he was carrying it back his eye fell upon a little heap of objects
carefully set down upon the bureau. They were the contents of the Old
Gentleman's pockets that the undertaker had removed when the body was
dressed for burial.

Vandover turned them over, sadly interested in them. There was the
watch, some old business letters and envelopes covered with memoranda,
his fountain-pen, a couple of cigars, a bank-book, a small amount of
change, his pen-knife, and one or two tablets of chewing-gum.

Vandover thrust the pen and the knife into his own pocket. The
bank-book, letters, and change he laid away in his father's desk, but
the cigars and the tablets of gum, together with the crumpled
pocket-handkerchief that he found on another part of the dressing-case,
he put into the Old Gentleman's hat, which he had hidden on the top
shelf of his clothes closet. The watch he hung upon a little brass
thermometer that always stood on his centre table. He even wound up the
watch with the resolve never to let it run down so long as he should
live.

The keys, however, disturbed him, and he kept changing them from one
hand to the other, looking at them very thoughtfully. They suggested to
him the inquiry as to whether or no his father had made a will, and how
much money he, Vandover, could now command. One of the keys was a long
brass key. Vandover knew that this unlocked a little iron box that from
time out of mind had been screwed upon the lower shelf of the clothes
closet in his father's room. It was in this box that the Old Gentleman
kept his ready money and a few important papers.

For a long time Vandover stood undecided, changing the keys about from
one hand to the other, hesitating before opening this iron box; he coul