“This is the only home I have. Where else can I go?”
“You can go wherever we are,” cried Helen impulsively, and Dr. Wright’s admiration for her was increased if possible.
“Oh, Miss Helen, you are so good! But Aunt Mandy needs me and maybe if I stay here I can make Josh wash, even in the winter time.”
“Well, maybe you can,” said the doctor kindly, “and it is a great thing to be needed and to see some chance of improving your fellow man. You could, with economy, get yourself through college on this money.”
“And then, of course, you own the land our camp is built on,” remembered Helen. “That is a thousand dollars more.”
“But I don’t want that,” exclaimed Gwen. “It has been so wonderful to have all of you here and so good to me.”
“But, my dear child, the land belongs to you and this Abner Dean will have to be the one to suffer, not you or the Carters. If you will let me, I will consult a lawyer in Richmond and have him take hold of the matter. Don’t you find a deed of some sort among those papers?”
There was no deed among the papers and, in fact, one never was found. The mystery was never solved how such an intelligent man as St. John Brownell evidently was had contented himself with a mere receipt for the $1,000 paid Abner Dean. He was perhaps suffering so with the nervous complaint which finally caused his death, that he had accepted the simplest method which presented itself to establish himself in a place where he hoped to find some peace.
While Helen was confined to her couch with the spurious sprained ankle, she helped Gwen unravel the story of her life from the letters found in the wonderful wallet. It was not such an extraordinary story, after all. St. John Brownell was of good family and education but evidently of small means, being the younger son of one of the many daughters of an impoverished earl. He had married young, come to America, and taken up teaching as a profession. His wife had died and then had come on him the strange malady that had caused him so much agony. Cities were hateful to him and he had decided that his small patrimony would serve best in some locality where the living was very inexpensive. Helen gathered from some of the letters that this patrimony amounted to about $3,000. He seemed to have arrived in the mountains with that much money in cash. He had bought the one hundred acres of land on the side of the mountain, hoping to improve it, possibly by going into Albemarle pippins. Gwen thought he had perhaps put his money into cash expecting to place it in a bank in Virginia; but as his malady gained on him all money dealings became very hateful and irksome to him, and he had evidently procrastinated until he had become in the habit of just carrying that roll of money around with him.
Gwen could recall nothing of her mother, but she remembered being in a kindergarten in New York and of course remembered coming to Virginia, and her father’s every characteristic was as fresh in her mind as though he had died only yesterday. The poor man had never been too miserable to be anything but gentle and loving to his little daughter, and he had spared no pains in teaching her, so that at nine years, her age when he had died, Gwen had been quite as well educated as many a child of twelve.