construction of New York town, in the quaint days when the sexton of Old
Trinity furnished fashionable hostesses with data concerning the
availability of social aspirants. He had been a courtly and fascinating
man, too. He had died a drunkard.

Now his grandchildren were fast forgetting him. The town had long since
forgotten him. Only an old friend or two and his old servants remembered
what he had been, his virtues, his magnificence, his kindness, and his
weakness.

But if the Seagrave twins possessed neither father nor mother to
exercise tender temporal and spiritual suzerainty in the nursery, and if
no memory of their grandfather's adoring authority remained, the last
will and testament of Anthony Seagrave had provided a marvellous,
man-created substitute for the dead: a vast, shadowy thing which ruled
their lives with passionless precision; which ordered their waking hours
even to the minutest particulars; which assumed machine-like charge of
their persons, their personal expenses, their bringing-up, their
schooling, the items of their daily routine.

This colossal automaton, almost terrifyingly impersonal, loomed always
above them, throwing its powerful and gigantic shadow across their
lives. As they grew old enough to understand, it became to them the
embodiment of occult and unpleasant authority which controlled their
coming and going; which chose for them their personal but not their
legal guardian, Kathleen Severn; which fixed upon the number of servants
necessary for the house that Anthony Seagrave directed should be
maintained for his grandchildren; which decided what kind of expenses,
what sort of clothing, what recreations, what accomplishments, what
studies, what religion they should be provided with.