“‘Somewhat!’ It’s said to be about a million of money! Look here!” and she showed him a begrimed and crumpled scrap of newspaper, containing a full account of “Cobbler” Horn’s fortune.
With a cry, Daniel Froud seized the woman, and shook her till it almost seemed as though the bones rattled in her skin.
“You hell-cat! Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
The wretched creature fell back panting against the door on the opposite side of the passage.
“Daniel Froud,” she said, when she had sufficiently recovered her breath, “the next time you do that I shall give you notice.”
With which dreadful threat, she gathered herself together, and hobbled back to her own quarter of the dingy house, leaving Mr. Froud to bemoan the absurdly easy terms he had made with “the Golden Shoemaker.”
“If I had only known!” he moaned; “if I had only known!”
That evening “Cobbler” Horn told his sister what he had done, and why he had done it; and she held up her hands in dismay.
“First,” she said, “I don’t see why you should have bought the house at all; and, secondly, you have paid far more for it than it is worth.”