"Why, from pigs—from Chicago," she said, laughing. "My father was of an old family, my mother wasn't, and one of her brothers made a fortune in a bacon factory. Unfortunately, he did not make it until after she was dead and I was married, or it might have stopped—oh, many things. But he left it to me—the bacon factory—and I sold it for—— But you won't let me tell you how much."
"Oh, you can tell me if it's yours," he said.
"Well, they told me I had been cheated. But what was I to do with a bacon factory? And I sold it for as much as I wanted to live comfortably on. I sold it for a quarter of a million dollars."
Dick's stare was still in evidence. "A quarter of a million! Dollars!" he repeated. "That's—what? Fifty thousand pounds. By the Lord, Virginia, you're an heiress after all."
CHAPTER XII
THE HOUSE PARTY
"My dear Emmeline," said the Judge, "if I hadn't such a profound contempt for Edward's intellect and for everything represented or misrepresented by him, I could feel it in my heart to be very sorry for him."
"My dear Herbert," replied Lady Birkett, "if you weren't as deeply sorry for him as you actually are, you wouldn't be your own kind, sympathetic, would-be-cynical self."
Sir Herbert and Lady Birkett with their two daughters and their son-in-law had arrived at Kencote that afternoon to make part of the company gathered there for the South Meadshire Hunt Ball. Other guests had arrived by a later train, but there had been an interval during which the Judge had been closeted with his brother-in-law, the Squire, and heard from him everything that had taken place within the past month, which was the interval that had elapsed since Dick had abruptly left Kencote. He had now come into his wife's bedroom, where she was in the later stages of dressing for dinner, although dinner was as yet half an hour off.