“What is that you tell me? Cornwallis has surrendered? What has become of the King?”
“The cause of the King is lost!”
“Then I don’t see that I have anything more to live for. Come in. I have nothing against you now, so far as I am concerned, for you came back—don’t you remember that on the night that I was to have been robbed you came back? I have never forgotten that. You came back.”
He tottered to the chest beside the table.
“Here, let me open the chest now while I have strength to unlock the lid. The King! the King! How he will feel when he hears the news! And he said of young Trumbull, ‘I pity him.’ His heart will go down like a sailor on the sea on a stormy night. Peter, I feel for him. Don’t you pity him? Sit down by me.”
He lifted the lid of the chest, and took out of the chest a leather bag. He untied the bag-string, and turned a pile of doubloons on the table.
“One. That is yours. You came back to your poor old uncle on the night when the robber was trying to find me.
“Two. It is yours, for you came back.
“Three. My sight is going. It is all yours, for you came back.