“Why not?” he muttered. “Why not?”
Suddenly he leaned forward and said softly:
“Has it ever concerned you to think what might be the source of your father’s income?”
“I have thought of it, dad, many and many a time. It wasn’t for me to ask. I have tried to force myself to believe that it came from our grandfather.”
“He was a just man, Renalt, and a hard. I married against his will and he never spoke to me afterward.”
“But the mill——”
“The mill he left to me, as it had been left to him. He would not, in his justice, deprive me of the means of living. ‘What my hands have wrought of this, his may do,’ he wrote. But all his little personal estate he willed elsewhere.”
“And you never worked the mill?”
“For a time I worked it, to some profit. We began not all empty-handed. She brought a little with her.”
“My mother?”