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 disgusting man. It ought to have gone to my dear brother, who supported him all these years. I don't see why he left it all to a remote cousin like you."

Sabine delved again into the envelope. "Wait," she said. "He explains that point himself . . . in his own will." She opened a copy of this document and, searching for a moment, read, "To my cousin, Sabine Callendar (Mrs. Cane Callendar), of—Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France, and Newport, Rhode Island, I leave all my collections of furniture, tapestries, bibelots, etc., in gratitude for her kindness to me over a period of many years and in return for her faith and understanding at a time when the rest of my family treated me as an outcast."

Aunt Cassie was beside herself. "And how should he have been treated if not as an outcast? He was an ungrateful, horrible wretch! It was Pentland money which supported him all his miserable life." She paused a moment for breath. "I always told my dear brother that twenty-five hundred a year was far more than Horace Pentland needed. And that is how he has spent it, to insult the very people who were kind to him."

Sabine put the papers back in the envelope and, looking up, said in her hard, metallic voice: "Money's not everything, as I told you once before, Aunt Cassie. I've always said that the trouble with the Pentlands . . . with most of Boston, for that matter . . . lies in the fact that they were lower middle-class shopkeepers to begin with and they've never lost any of the lower middle-class virtues . . . especially about money. They've been proud of living off the income of their incomes. . . . No, it wasn't money that Horace Pentland wanted. It was a little decency and kindness and intelligence. I fancy you got your money's worth out of the poor twenty-five hundred dollars you sent him every year. It was worth a great deal more than that to keep the truth under a bushel."