id, low-minded, grasping beast, and a miser, and
a tyrant, and (I think) a parricide; she notified him that he was
thoroughly unworthy to wipe the dust off his nephew's shoes--an
office toward which, to do him justice, he had never shown any marked
aspirations--and that Billy had acted throughout in a most noble and
sensible manner; and that, personally, she wouldn't marry Billy Woods
if he were the last man on earth, for she had always despised him; and
she added the information that she expected to die shortly, and she
hoped they would both be sorry _then_; and subsequently she clapped
the climax by throwing her arms about his neck and bursting into tears
and telling him he was the dearest old man in the world and that she
was thoroughly ashamed of herself.

So they kissed and made it up. And after a little the Colonel and
Margaret went away from Selwoode, and Frederick R. Woods was left
alone to nourish his anger and indignation, if he could, and to hunger
for his boy, whether he would or not. He was too proud to seek him
out; indeed, he never thought of that; and so he waited alone in his
fine house, sick at heart, impotent, hoping against hope that the boy
would come back. The boy never came.

No, the boy never came, because he was what the old man had made
him--headstrong, and wilful, and obstinate. Billy had been thoroughly
spoiled. The old man had nurtured his pride, had applauded it as a
mark of proper spirit; and now it was this same pride that had robbed
him of the one thing he loved in all the world.

So, at last, the weak point in the armour of this sturdy old Pharisee
was found, and Fate had pierced it gaily. It was retribution, if you
will; and I think that none of his victims in "the Street," none of
the countless widows and orphans that he had made, suffered more
bitterly than he in those last days.

It was almost two years after Billy's departure from Selwoode that his
body-servant, coming to rouse Frederick R. Woods one June morning,
found him dead in his rooms. He had been ailing for some time. It
was his heart, the doctors said; and I think that it was, though not
precisely in the sense which they meant.

The man found him seated before his great carved desk, on which his
head and shoulders had fallen forward; they rested on a sheet of
legal-cap paper half-covered with a calculation in his crabbed old
hand as to the value of certain properties--the calculation which he
never finished; and unde