“My poor Jessie,” he began, but her low, sweet laugh stopped him.
“Not poor! Never poor again, Robert!” she cried. “God is very good to us. At the very darkest hour He has shown us the dawn. Robert, we are rich!”
“Great goodness, Jessie! What do you mean? Exclaimed Mr. Sherwood, stumbling to his feet at last.
“It's true! It's true, Papa Sherwood!” Nan cried, clapping her hands. “Don't you call ten thousand dollars riches?”
“Ten, thousand, dollars?” murmured her father. He put his hand to his head and looked confusedly about for a seat, into which he weakly dropped. Nan had picked up the letter and now she dramatically thrust it into his hand.
“Read that, Papa Sherwood!” she said commandingly.
He read the communication from the Scotch attorney, first with immense surprise, then with profound doubt. Who but a young imaginative girl, like Nan, or a woman with unbounded faith in the miracles of God, like her mother, could accept such a perfectly wonderful thing as being real?
“A hoax,” thought the man who had worked so hard all his life without the least expectation of ever seeing a penny that he did not earn himself. “Can it be that any of those heedless relatives of my wife's in Memphis have attempted a practical joke at this time?”
He motioned for Nan to bring him the envelope, too. This he examined closely, and then read the communication again. 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.”