oor! Never poor again, Robert!" she cried. "God is very good to
us. At the very darkest hour He has shown us the dawn. Robert, we are
rich!"

"Great goodness, Jessie! What do you mean? Exclaimed Mr. Sherwood,
stumbling to his feet at last.

"It's true! It's true, Papa Sherwood!" Nan cried, clapping her hands.
"Don't you call ten thousand dollars riches?"

"Ten, thousand, dollars?" murmured her father. He put his hand to
his head and looked confusedly about for a seat, into which he weakly
dropped. Nan had picked up the letter and now she dramatically thrust it
into his hand.

"Read that, Papa Sherwood!" she said commandingly.

He read the communication from the Scotch attorney, first with immense
surprise, then with profound doubt. Who but a young imaginative girl,
like Nan, or a woman with unbounded faith in the miracles of God, like
her mother, could accept such a perfectly wonderful thing as being real?

"A hoax," thought the man who had worked so hard all his life without
the least expectation of ever seeing a penny that he did not earn
himself. "Can it be that any of those heedless relatives of my wife's in
Memphis have attempted a practical joke at this time?"

He motioned for Nan to bring him the envelope, too. This he examined
closely, and then read the communication again. It looked all regular.
The stationery, the postmark, the date upon it, all seemed perfectly in
accord.

Mrs. Sherwood's gay little laugh shattered the train of her husband's
thought. "I know what the matter is with you, Papa Sherwood," she said.
"You think it must be a practical joke."

"Oh!" gasped Nan, feeling a positive pain at her heart. This awful
possibility had never entered her mind before.

"But it isn't," went on her mother blithely. "It is real. Mr. Hugh
Blake, of Emberon, must have been very old; and he was probably as
saving and canny as any Scotchman who ever wore kilts. It is not
surprising that he should have left an estate of considerable size-----"

"Ten thousand dollars!" breathed Nan again. She loved to repeat it.
There was white magic in the very sound of such a sum of money. But her
father threw a conversational bomb into their midst the next instant.

"Ten thousand dollars, you goosey!" he said vigorously. "That's the main
doubt in the whole business. It isn't ten thousand dollars. It's fifty
thousand dollars! A pound, either English or Scotch, is almost five of
our dollars. Ten thousand dollars would cert