"I suppose it's growed considerable."
Then both were silent. The mason's mind was turbulent with feelings and thoughts. Across the glorious reach of land and sky before his eyes there opened a vision of radiant palaces and possessions, all that money could buy to appease the desires of a starved life.
"My folks will be some surprised," he remarked at last, with his ironical laugh.
"I suppose so," Adelle replied seriously. "You'll have to explain it to them. How many brothers and sisters have you?"
"There are five of us left," Clark said. "I'm sorry mother has gone. She would have liked mighty well having a bit of ready money for herself. She never had much of a time in her life," he added, thinking of the hard-working wife and mother who had died in poverty after struggling against odds for fifty years. "It'll mean a good deal, too, to Will and Stan, I guess;—they've got families, you know."
Adelle listened with a curious detachment to the happiness that her magic lamp might bestow when handed over to the other branch of the family.
"Money doesn't always mean so much," she remarked, with a deep realization of the platitude which so many people repeat hypocritically.
The mason looked at her skeptically out of his blue eyes. That was the sort of silly pretense the rich or well-to-do often got off for the benefit of their poorer neighbors—he read stories like that in the newspapers and magazines. But he knew that the rich usually clung to all their possessions, in spite of their expressed conviction, at times, of the inadequacy of material things to provide them with happiness. He was quite ready for his part, having experienced the other side, to run the risks of property!
"I'd like to try having all the money I want for a time!" he laughed hardily.
"I almost believe it would have been better for me if I had never heard of Clark's Field!" Adelle exclaimed, with a bitter sense of the futility of her own living. And then she told her cousin very briefly what had happened to her since she first entered the probate court and had been made a ward of the trust company.