"With boisterous companions!" I supplied the words

in my cheerfullest tone. "No; my conduct shall be exemplary,

Mr. Pickering," I added, with affable irony.

He picked up a single sheet of thin type-written

paper and passed it across the table. It was a formal

acquiescence in the provisions of the will. Pickering

had prepared it in advance of my coming, and this assumption

that I would accept the terms irritated me.

Assumptions as to what I should do under given conditions

had always irritated me, and accounted, in a

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large measure, for my proneness to surprise and disappoint

people. Pickering summoned a clerk to witness

my signature.

"How soon shall you take possession?" he asked. "I

have to make a record of that."

"I shall start for Indiana to-morrow," I answered.

"You are prompt," he replied, deliberately folding in

quarters the paper I had just signed. "I hoped you

might dine with me before going out; but I fancy New

York is pretty tame after the cafés and bazaars of the

East."

His reference to my wanderings angered me again;

for here was the point at which I was most sensitive.

I was twenty-seven and had spent my patrimony; I had

tasted the bread of many lands, and I was doomed to

spend a year qualifying myself for my grandfather's

legacy by settling down on an abandoned and lonely

Indiana farm that I had never seen and had no interest

in whatever.

As I rose to go Pickering said: "It will be sufficient if you drop me a line, say once

a month, to let me know you are there. The post-office

is Annandale."

"I suppose I might file a supply of postal cards in the

village and arrange for the mailing of one every

month."

"It might be done that way," be answered evenly.

"We may perhaps meet again, if I don't die of starvation

or ennui. Good-by."

We shook hands stiffly and I left him, going down in

an elevator filled with eager-eyed, anxious men. I, at

least, had no cares of business. It made no difference

to me whether the market rose or fell. Something of

the spirit of adventure that had been my curse quickened

in my heart as I walked through crowded Broadway

past Trinity Church to a bank and drew the balance

remaining on my letter of credit. I received in

currency slightly less than one thousand dollars.

As I turned from the teller's window I ran into the

arms of the last man in the world I expected to see.




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