“Nor would anyone wish you to,” said she. “This solitary room, with its dangling skulls and queer old images, its secrecy and darkness, and the graves pressing up almost to your window, seems a part of Dr. Izard. I could not imagine you in a trim office with a gig at the door and a man to drive it. No, it would rob us of half our faith in you, to see you enjoying life like other folks. You must stay here if only because my mother, lying over there in her solitary grave, would be lonely were your face to fail to appear every night and morning in your open doorway.”
Her hand, which had paused in its restless action, pointed over her shoulder to the silent yard without. The physician’s eye followed it, and the words of reproof died upon his tongue.
“You think me frivolous,” she cried. “Well, so I am, at times. But you make me think; and if this sudden accession to fortune fills me with excitement and delight, the sight of you sitting here, and the nearness of my mother’s tomb, gives me some sober thoughts too, and—and—Dr. Izard, will you tell me one thing? Why do people stare when they hear the exact amount of the money left me? It is not because it is so large; for some say it is anything but a large fortune. Is it—” she hesitated a little, probably because it was always hard to talk to Dr. Izard—“for the reason that it is so near the sum my father was said to have carried away with him, when he left me so suddenly?”
The wind was fluttering the vines, and the doctor turned his head to look that way. When he glanced back he answered quietly, but with no irritation in his voice:
“It is hard to tell what causes the stare of ignorant people. What was the amount which has been left you? I do not think you have mentioned the exact figure.”
“Twenty thousand dollars,” she whispered. “Isn’t it splendid,—a lordly fortune, for such a poor girl as I am?”
“Yes,” he acquiesced, “yes.” But he seemed struck just as others had been who heard it.
“And was not that just what was paid papa by the French government just before mamma died?”
“I have heard it so said,” was the short reply.
“And don’t you know?” she asked.