Mr. Trevor was sixty-five when the idea of making his will occurred to him first. Not that he had left Lucy’s fortune in any doubt up to that moment. A brief and concise little document existed in his lawyer’s hands, putting her rights entirely beyond question; but it was years after the making of this first will that the idea occurred to him of shaping out Lucy’s life for her, and settling the course of years after he should have himself passed from the conduct of affairs. He was a man who had lived a very matter-of-fact life; but John Trevor was not a man without imagination. Even in the days when he had least time for such vanities, there had been gleams of fancy about him, and he had always been fond of entering into the circumstances of his pupils, and giving them his advice. They all knew that to have his advice asked was a thing that pleased him. And the management of a great fortune excites the mind and draws forth the imagination. He had to throw himself into all the combinations of speculative money-making, the romance of shares and coupons; and had acquired a sort of divination, a spirit of prophecy, a power of seeing what was about to pay or not to pay. Some men have this power by nature, but few acquire it; and no doubt it had lain dormant in John Trevor all the years during which, having no money to invest, he had not cared to exercise his faculties as to the best investment. When, however, he had made many very successful _coups_, and eluded many stumbles, and steered triumphantly through some dangers, a sense of his own cleverness and power stole into his heart. He felt that he was a man with great powers of administration, and instincts which it was a thousand pities not to make use of; and it suddenly came into his mind one evening, when he had just added several thousand pounds to Lucy’s fortune by a very successful and clever operation, that he might exercise these powers in a still more effectual way. Ah! if Lucy’s fortune had been a poor little trumpery bit of a fortune, not enough for the girl to live on, it would not have increased like this, it would never have doubled itself, as old Trevor’s money did! Even Providence seemed in the compact, and gave the advantage to the heiress, just as the richer people of the Rainy kindred did, who gave her their money because she had so much already. But this is a digression. As Mr. Trevor thought over the whole question--and naturally Lucy’s fortune, which was his chief occupation, was also the thing that took up most of his thoughts--he could not but feel a vivid regret that it would be impossible to outlive his own ending, and see how the money throve in Lucy’s hands. This seems a whimsical regret, but it is not an unnatural one. Could we only keep a share of what is going on, could we but be sure of seeing our ideas carried out, and assisting at our own dying and burying, and all that would follow after, death would be a much less dismal matter. To be sure, in most cases the penalty of this post-mortem spectatorship would be that we should not see our ideas carried out at all. But this was not what Mr. Trevor looked forward to. He would have been quite content to give up his share in the world, if he could only have kept an eye on the course of events afterward, and retained some power of suggesting, at least, what ought to be done. But even under the most favorable view, the hereafter for which we hope was not likely, Mr. Trevor felt, to permit any active intervention of the disembodied spirit in the matter of stocks or shares. And it was a painful check to him to feel that, in a few years at the most, Lucy’s property and herself would be deprived of the invaluable guidance which his own experience and intelligence would give. It was while this regret was heavy upon him that the idea of making a will suddenly occurred to him--not the ordinary sort of will, a thing which, as already indicated, was made long ago, but a potential and living instrument, by which out of his grave he would still be able to look after the affairs which had cost him so much trouble, and which had so prospered in his hands. The idea stirred him with the liveliest thrill of pleasure. He began the document the very next day, after laying in a stock of paper, large blue folio, lined and crackling, that the very outward form might be absolutely correct. And it was a very remarkable document; it was the romance, the poem of John Trevor’s life. Sitting by himself among his coupons and account books, he had evolved out of his own consciousness, bit by bit, the ideal of a millionaire--nay, of a female millionaire--of an heiress, not in her usual aspect as the prey of fortune-hunters, pursued for love, not of herself, but of her money.