For one thing, Lord Miller had to seek out his wife’s neglected grave, and place a fitting monument above the gentle heart that his father’s wickedness had driven wild with despair. The thought of all she had suffered would haunt Lord Miller with keen despair as long as he lived.
Then, too, a great force of men was put to work on Suicide Place, to tear it down stone by stone to the ground, that its haunting spirit should claim no more maddened victims of the craze for gold. Even the grove was hewn down, that the very site should be forgotten, and Lady Florence presented the farm to Mount Vernon to be turned into a pleasure park.
The chests of gold that had been seen in ghastly visions of the night by so many poor victims were found to be a reality.
They were walled up in stone beneath the brick flooring of the cellar, and contained riches to the amount of half a million.
It seemed like a ghastly legacy to Floy, and she tried to atone for the sin of old Jasper Nellest, by devoting more than half of it to works of charity.
She had seen so much of the world’s poverty and sorrow while she was poor herself, that she knew how to pity and sympathize, and, better still, to lend a helping hand.
She did not neglect to search out the good Mrs. Banks, who was now adrift on the world since poverty had fallen on the Maury family, and oh! what joy it was to the kind soul to see Floy again, whom she had mourned as dead.
She rejoiced unselfishly in the girl’s good fortune, and wept when she clasped her in her arms, exclaiming:
“You shall come and live with me now, and be rich and grand.”
“Oh, dearie, I could never go away from Mount Vernon and my poor John’s grave!” she cried in her simple, faithful fidelity.