A glance at the balance recorded, a reperusal of the “idea,” and the impressive silence was broken into a thousand fragments.
“For you see, Dan,” Polly explained, when, at last, she had secured a hearing, “I shouldn’t know what in the world to 184 do with so much money,—some rich people don’t, they say,—and I’ve got plenty of ideas to last us for years to come. Then, just as they begin to give out, you’ll have got to be a mining engineer, with your pockets cram-full of money, and you’ll have to support me for the rest of my life. So I don’t see but that I’m getting the best of the bargain, after all!”
It all seemed perfectly natural to Dan. This sister of his had always lent a hand when he needed it. Of course he would accept her help, and let the future, the glorious, inexhaustible future straighten out the account between them. He did not express himself even in his inmost thoughts in any such high-flown manner as this. He simply gave an Indian war-whoop, administered to Polly a portentous hug, and declared for the hundredth time, “Polly, you beat the world!”
When everything was thus amicably settled and Dan had agreed to “give notice” in his capacity as Mercury, the following day, Polly said: “You won’t mind 185 being poor, will you, Dan? You don’t wish we were rich, do you?”
“Rich? Why, we are rich!”
“But, Dan, if any one came along and offered you a lot of money, say a thousand dollars a year, you wouldn’t take it, would you?”
“Do you mean a stranger, Polly, some one we hadn’t any claim on?”
“Yes; but somebody who had such a lot he wouldn’t miss it. Would you take it, Dan? Say, would you take it?”
“What a goose you are, Polly! Of course I wouldn’t take it! I would rather go back to the Augæans for the rest of my life!”
On the evening of that momentous Christmas Day, our two young people had out their Latin books and began industriously to polish up their somewhat rusty acquirements in that classic tongue. A year ago they might not have regarded this as precisely a holiday pastime, but their ideas had undergone a great change since then.