“I know,” said Miss Mason, “that people often feel a kind of pride about accepting money, though why on earth they should calmly take it from dead people and refuse to accept it from living ones, I can’t imagine. Of course their argument might be that dead people can’t use it themselves. That would be true. But then this special living person can’t use all hers. Let me just put things clearly to you. I have a capital that brings me in fifteen thousand a year. Five thousand a year I am devoting to a certain scheme in which Barnabas is helping me. I wish to make over sufficient capital to you and Paul to bring you in two thousand five hundred a year each. That will leave me with five thousand a year for my own use. My dear, I don’t even spend that.”
“But charities——” began Sara vaguely.
“Pooh!” said Miss Mason. “I’m sick of them. If you’d written as many charitable letters as I have you’d have had enough of charities. I wrote hundreds for Miss Stanhope. She always filled in the amount she gave herself. I never knew what it was. But I can give to all the charities I want out of five thousand. Now, my dear, will you agree. Will you give me the pleasure of your acceptance and allow me a few more years on this extremely pleasant planet in which I can see your happiness, instead of waiting till I’m dead and coming then to drop a few grateful tears and white flowers on my grave. I’d infinitely prefer the former I assure you.”
Sara gave a little half-laughing sob. “I accept with all my heart,” she said, “and I don’t know how ever I am to thank you.”
Miss Mason grunted. “Now there’s another thing,” she said, “please don’t try. Do think if you can that the money just happened into the bank without any human agency. If you’re going to keep an eternal feeling of gratitude before your mind it will spoil everything. I want to be able to quarrel with you and Paul and scold you as much as I like, and if I felt that gratitude was preventing you from answering me back it would destroy my whole pleasure in the proceeding. Besides, my dear, if there is any debt owing it is I who owe it. I’ve never forgotten the hope you gave me the first evening we met.”
Sara stretched out her hands with a little laugh of pure happiness. It was the first time she had laughed like that for three months.
“And I tried to sermonize a little,” she cried. “And then we got on to fairy tales, and I was happier. Oh, isn’t life a fairy tale! And if we told all the dull, prosaic people of the truly delightful and unexpected things that happen wouldn’t they say that it was all made-up, and far-fetched, and things like that. When it is just that they are too stupid to see the happenings, and too heavy and dull to look over the wall in which they have enclosed themselves. I can’t tell you how happy I am. And will you think me a pig if I run away for a little while and tell Paul?”
She got up from her chair, radiant, vital, as she had been on the day she had first entered the studio.
“My dear,” said Miss Mason, “if you hadn’t said you were going I should have sent you.”
Sara held out both her hands. “It seems,” she said, “as if I were taking it too quietly, and as if I ought to have protested more. But after everything you said I really couldn’t. It was all so absolutely true. And we’d both so much rather have you here seeing our happiness in your wonderful legacy, than that we should go to a grave to thank you, and lay that white flower tenderly on the grass.”