next time I called. The housekeeper was downstairs drunk, and I fooled—about as a young man will—with the girl in the passage before I went to him. He was sinking fast. But even then his vanity clung to him.
"Have you read it?" he whispered.
"Sat up all night reading it," I said in his ear to cheer him. "It's the last," said I, and then, with a memory of some poetry or other in my head, "but it's the bravest and best."
He smiled a little and tried to squeeze my hand as a woman might do, and left off squeezing in the middle, and lay still. "The bravest and the best," said I again, seeing it pleased him. But he didn't answer. I heard the girl giggle outside the door, for occasionally we'd had just a bit of innocent laughter, you know, at his ways. I looked at his face, and his eyes were closed, and it was just as if somebody had punched in his nose on either side. But he was still smiling. It's queer to think of—he lay dead, lay dead there, an utter failure, with the smile of success on his face.
"That was the end of my uncle. You can imagine me and my mother saw that he had a decent funeral. Then, of course, came the hunt for the will. We began decent and respectful at first, and before the day was out we were ripping chairs, and smashing bureau panels, and sounding walls. Every hour we expected those others to come in. We asked the housekeeper, and found she'd actually witnessed a will—on an ordinary half-sheet of notepaper it was written, and very short, she said—not a month ago.
