"All paid off—gone, weeks since," replied Revis, laconically.
"And the stuffs about those shafts—material—the building material at those cottages, and all that?" she inquired.
"Sold—to settle things up," said Revis. "Your partner had power to do all that, you know, as you couldn't. We all made the biggest effort we could for you and for her. To put things in a nutshell—you owe nothing to the bank or to anybody, and the whole concern is just a ruin which anybody can take up and remake if they like. I would have liked, but it isn't worth it."
Jeckie looked steadily at her visitor for a long time.
"Then," she said at last, in a low voice that was curiously firm, "then—I've nothing?"
Revis shook his head.
"Nothing," he answered. "Nothing! except the forty acres that you bought in the beginning."
He was surprised to hear Jeckie laugh. He was something of a student of human nature, this big, bluff man, but he could not gauge the precise meaning of that laugh, and he looked at the woman before him, in some slight alarm, which she was quick to recognise.
"I'm not going mad, Revis," she said. "I was only thinking that at the end of all that I've got—forty acres! Those forty acres!"
"How much did you give for them?" he asked, inquisitively. "A lot? I'd an idea it was for next to naught that you got them."