Miss Browne looked quite shaken at the result her arithmetic produced—seven hundred and twenty thousand eggs! Three thousand pounds!
The excitement made her work out the results of the third year, and she was weeping when the sun came out—sixty thousand pounds. She was weeping for her grey spoiled life. Exquisite dresses, travel, health, even marriage, and little children of her own, would have been all possible, had she worked these sums years and years ago, and set to work with twelve fowls.
Bart still had misgivings.
'More might die than that,' he said.
Hermie was quite pale with excitement.
'We have counted that half that come out die,' she said, 'and Lizzie says her mother always reared ten out of every thirteen. We have only counted six. But count three, if you like; still, that is thirty thousand pounds. And we have not counted selling any.'
Even Bart saw the moderation that only counted three chickens to each hatching, and his doubts died away.
Visions of all this wealth intoxicated the children; they tore their father from his book; Hermie told him, with eyes ashine with tears and little heaving breast, that he was never to do any more of that dreadful ploughing, that in three years they would be making thirty thousand a year, at least, by no harder work than just feeding the fowls and packing up eggs.
He smiled at them very gently; he could not bear to damp their ardour. In very truth he could not exactly find out why these figures should not be as they seemed.
'Of course you would have a huge feed-bill and want a big run of land,' he said.