"And I suppose it's really you who makes me my allowance of twenty-five pounds a year? What I thought was that perhaps you'd rather give me a lump sum now when it would be more useful than go on paying me an allowance. Another thing is that I should hate to feel I was coming into money when you died, and, of course, if you gave me my money now I shouldn't feel that."
"My dear child, how am I to find any large sum of money now? It's very sweet of you to put it in that way, but you don't understand how difficult these matters are."
"How much money have you got of your own?" asked Norah.
Mrs. Caffyn thought this was rather an improper question; but Norah was looking so very grown up that she did not like to elude the answer as she had been wont to elude many answers of many childish questions through all these years of married life.
"Well, dear," she said, with the air of one who was revealing a dangerous family secret, "I suppose you're old enough to hear these things now. I have three hundred pounds a year of my own—at least, when I say of my own, you mustn't think that means three hundred a year to spend on myself. Your father is very just, and though he helps me as much as he is able, all the money is taken up in household expenses."
"Well, twenty-five pounds a year," said Norah, "at five per cent. is the interest on five hundred pounds."
"Is it, dear?" asked her mother, in a frightened voice.
"If you give me five hundred pounds now you wouldn't have to pay me twenty-five pounds a year. And if you lived for another twenty-five years you'd save one hundred and twenty-five pounds that way."
Mrs. Caffyn looked as if she would soon faint at these rapid calculations.
"How am I to get five hundred pounds?" she asked, hopelessly.