“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.”
“Oh, dear me!” said Nan weakly.
But Mrs. Sherwood merely laughed again. “The more the better,” she said. “Why shouldn't we be able to put fifty thousand dollars to good use?”
“Oh, we can, Momsey,” said Nan eagerly. “But, will we be let?”
Mr. Sherwood laughed grimly at that; but his wife continued confidently:
“I am sure nobody needs it more than we do.”
“Why!” her daughter said, just as excitedly, “we'll be as rich as Bess Harley's folks. Oh, Momsey! Oh, Papa Sherwood! Can I go to Lakewood Hall?”