Cynthia Wakeham's Money

by Anna Katharine Green

"Perhaps, then, you won't," suggested Huckins, while he seemed to grow instantly at least two inches in stature. "If they are not in Marston where are they? Dead! And that leaves me the undisputed heir to all my sister's savings."

"I do not believe them dead," protested Frank.

"Why?" Huckins half smiled, half snarled.

"Some token of the fact would have come to you. You are not in a strange land or in unknown parts; you are living in the old homestead where this lost sister of yours was reared. You would have heard if she had died, at least so it strikes an unprejudiced mind."

"Then let it strike yours to the contrary," snapped out his angry companion. "When she went away it was in anger and with the curse of her father ringing in her ears. Do you see that porch?" And Huckins pointed through the cracked windows to a decayed pair of steps leading from the side of the house. "It was there she ran down on her way out. I see her now, though forty years have passed, and I, a little fellow of six, neither understood nor appreciated what was happening. My father stood in the window above, and he cried out: 'Don't come back! You have chosen your way, now go in it. Let me never see you nor hear from you again.' And we never did, never! And now you tell me we would have heard if she had died. You don't know the heart of folks if you say that. Harriet cut herself adrift that day, and she knew it."

"Yet you were acquainted with the fact that she went to Marston."

The indignant light in the brother's eye settled into a look of cunning.

"Oh," he acknowledged carelessly, "we heard so at the time, when everything was fresh. But we heard nothing more, nothing."

"Nothing?" Frank repeated. "Not that she had married and had had children?"

"No," was the dogged reply. "My sister up there," and Huckins jerked his hand towards the room where poor Mrs. Wakeham lay, "surmised things, but she didn't know anything for certain. If she had she might have sent for these folks long ago. She had time enough in the last ten years we have been living in this hole together."