Kenny looked crestfallen.
"And there is nothing more?" he said. "Think, Joan, think!"
"Nothing," said Joan. "Donald and I were afraid of Uncle. We never dared to ask him questions. And he never spoke of my mother save to sneer and curse the stage. What is it, Kenny? What are you thinking?"
"I think," said Kenny, making a colossal effort to speak with the calm he could not feel, "that somewhere buried on the farm is a great deal of money. I think it belonged to your mother and that it was left in trust to your uncle for Donald and you—"
"Kenny!"
"I think," went on Kenny steadily, "that this singular clause in your uncle's will was a miser's struggle between justice and his instinct for hoarding and hiding. Money he had kept so long he hated to relinquish. Yet he dared not keep it. And so he buried the money. God knows how or where, and shunted the responsibility of its finding upon me. If it was never found, as perhaps he hoped, he had still fulfilled his trust and the dictates of his conscience in willing the money back to you."
"But, Kenny, how could he bury it?"
"How often," reminded Kenny, "has Hughie in summer wheeled him out to the orchard and left him there? How often has he wheeled himself around the walk by the lilac bush? And he was clever and cunning. Could he not, from time to time, hide the money in his bathrobe and find some means of digging?"
Joan looked unconvinced.
"And where," she said, "would my mother, who earned her living on the stage, get money? A great deal, I mean?"