It
looked all regular. The stationery, the postmark, the date
upon it, all seemed perfectly in accord.
Mrs. Sherwood's gay little laugh shattered the train of her
husband's thought. "I know what the matter is with you, Papa
Sherwood," she said. "You think it must be a practical joke."
"Oh!" gasped Nan, feeling a positive pain at her heart. This
awful possibility had never entered her mind before.
"But it isn't," went on her mother blithely. "It is real. Mr.
Hugh Blake, of Emberon, must have been very old; and he was
probably as saving and canny as any Scotchman who ever wore
kilts. It is not surprising that he should have left an estate
of considerable size-----"
"Ten thousand dollars!" breathed Nan again. She loved to repeat
it. There was white magic in the very sound of such a sum of
money. But her father threw a conversational bomb into their
midst the next instant.
"Ten thousand dollars, you goosey!" he said vigorously. "That's
the main doubt in the whole business. It isn't ten thousand
dollars. It's fifty thousand dollars! A pound, either English
or Scotch, is almost five of our dollars. Ten thousand dollars
would certainly be a fortune for us; fifty thousand is beyond the
dreams of avarice.
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