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LL the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance. His education in France had been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do. They had been young people with good qualities, and very much in love, but they could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small income from her father—only about sixteen hundred a year, but it had made all the difference in the world. A few memorable interregnums between servants had let him know that Lillian couldn’t pinch and be shabby and do housework, as the wives of some of his colleagues did. Under such conditions she became another person, and a bitter one.

Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn’t possibly have imagined; his strange coming, his strange story, his devotion, his early death and posthumous fame—it was all fantastic. Fantastic, too, that this tramp boy should amass a fortune for someone whose name he had never heard, for “an extravagant and wheeling stranger.” The Professor often thought of that curiously bitter burst from