"It's a very small inheritance, isn't it!" asked Aunt Katrina, languidly.
"About fifteen hundred dollars, I believe. But you must remember that without it those children, probably, will have nothing but that mortgaged land."
"I don't think the people here know or care whether they've got money or not," said Aunt Katrina, in a disgusted tone.
"No, they don't. Probably that is one of the reasons why I like them so well."
"Yet you have a clear idea of the value of property, Evert."
"I should think I had! I've worked for it—my idea."
"Tell me one thing," pursued Aunt Katrina, whose mind was now on her nephew's affairs. "When you went north last month, wasn't it on account of something connected with that cousin of yours, or rather of your father's, David Winthrop?"
"Well, David has great capacity: he is really wonderful," answered Winthrop, coming out of his reverie to smile at the remembrance of the ineffectual man. "In spite of the new partnership, he had managed to tangle up everything almost worse than before."
"Yet people call you hard!" commented Aunt Katrina, plaintively.
"I am hard, I spend half my time trying not to be," responded her nephew, in what she called one of his puzzling tones. Aunt Katrina sometimes found Evert very puzzling.