When Roger Wade’s Aunt Bella died she left him forty thousand dollars in five-per-cent railway bonds and six hundred and ninety acres of wilderness extending from the outskirts of Deer Spring village to the eastern shore of Lake Wauchong, in northern New Jersey. She had contrived to quarrel and break with all her other relations. This was no easy undertaking, and in its success was a signal tribute to her force of character; for, each and everyone of those relatives knew of her possessions and longed and hoped for them and stood ready to endure, even to welcome, any outrage she might see fit to perpetrate. Roger she had not seen in fourteen years—not since he, a youth of eighteen, a painter born, long and lean, with a shock of black-brown hair and dreamy, gray-brown eyes, left his native Deer Spring to study in Paris. 

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