“Here is your sun-dollar, my dear,” he said in fatherly tones; “it has brought you a very strange piece of good fortune; through your initials on the coin—which irritated me at first—I was led to question you; and, now, I haven’t the slightest hesitation in saying that I am sure you are the heiress to that old legacy—a debt of gratitude to your great-grandfather for saving a life—and that, with my assistance, you can claim it at any time.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh-h!” These bomb-like exclamations, fired off into the stillness of the great room with its decorated panels and portly, gaudy lanterns, were for a minute the only sound to be heard. “Don’t faint—Jessica!” pleaded the Astronomer then.
“How much is the legacy?” Miles spoke huskily.
The lawyer cleared his throat. “Well! money looked bigger in those days, I suppose, and the merchant was a comparatively poor man,” he prefaced; “the original legacy was only three hundred dollars.”
“Three hundred! He didn’t put a big price on his life.” Miles kicked vehemently at a chair.
Every one’s elated countenance fell—with the exception of the new-found heiress who was thinking proudly of that deed of her great-grandfather—three hundred dollars: it was better than nothing! But it was a very small windfall which had fallen among them with a very big thud and they resented the noise it made.
“Ah! but you forget”—a smile crept over the lawyer’s face—“you forget that the legacy has lain in that savings bank at compound interest, compounding and compounding for nearly seventy-five years; I can’t compute exactly its present amount at a moment’s notice, but I know that it is in the neighborhood of twenty-five hundred dollars; that isn’t such a bad little nest-egg for pin-money, eh,” smiling at Jessica’s white face, “even when my small fee is deducted?”
Silence again.
“Twenty-five hundred!” The shriek came from Sesooā. With a spring Sally flung herself upon the “modest heiress,” flung her arms about her. “Oh! Jessica,” she cried. “Jessica, darling! you can go to a school of art—to a dozen schools of art, if you want to, now!” wildly. “She thought she must earn her living as a stenographer in a business office!” Sally flashed round upon the company, a smocked flame. “And—and she didn’t want to—though I’d like it well enough—because she loves color and she has the makings in her of being an artist, a designer like her father, painting beautiful windows with saints’ heads—and things! She says girls do that, sometimes, now. An’ she wants to—but she must have an education—and to design a Camp Fire Girls’ colored window, some day, if ever we girls get a grand National Building!”
Sally had soared to a hill of imagination from which she crowed upon the listeners like a veritable flame-bird, mocking coherency.