“Oh, Mother,” wailed Bob, “if you’d only listened, instead of talking yourself!”
Mrs. Hartley smiled, as if she were used to such comments at this part of the story.
“Well,” she said, “I think Sinclair may take up the recital here. That is, if you’re interested, Patty?”
“If I’m interested! Indeed I am! It’s very exciting, and I want it all now; no ‘continued in our next.’”
“We don’t know the end, ourselves,” said Mabel, with such a wistful look in her eyes that Patty went over and sat by her, and with her arm round her listened to the rest of the story.
“Well, then,” said Sinclair, in his grave, kindly voice, “Uncle Marmaduke tried very hard to communicate to mother and Grandy something about his fortune. But his accident had somehow paralysed his throat, and he could scarcely articulate. But for an hour or more, as he lay dying, he would look at them with piercing glances, and say what sounded like dickens! gold!”
“Did he mean gold money?” asked Patty, impulsively.
“They didn’t know, then. But they thought at the time that dickens! was one of his angry expletives, as he was given to such language. The gold, they felt sure, referred to his fortune, which he had always declared he would leave to Grandmother. Then he died, without being able to say any other except those two words, gold and dickens.”
“He might have meant Charles Dickens,” suggested Patty, who dearly loved to guess at a puzzle.
“As it turned out, he did,” said Sinclair, serenely; “but that’s ahead of the story.”