thought there were reasons not to. But now I must tell
you before you go."

"Don't trouble yourself now, ma'am," the mason said gently. "I guess
it'll keep until you're feelin' stronger."

"No, no, I can't wait. I must tell you now!" She raised herself with
effort and leaned her thin face upon her hands. "I want him"--she
pointed to Archie--"to hear it, too."

Then she tried again to collect her mind, to phrase what she had to say
in the clearest possible way.

"Half of my money belongs to you, Mr. Clark."

The two men must have thought that her reason had left her after the
terrible night, but she soon made her meaning clear.

"I didn't know it until a little while ago when I found out from those
letters who you were. Not even then, just afterwards. Clark's Field was
left to your grandfather and mine together, and somehow I got the whole
of it--I mean I did from my mother and uncle. The lawyers can tell you
all about it. Only it's really half yours--half of all there was!"

Archie now began to comprehend that his wife referred to the old legal
difficulty over the title to Clark's Field, and interposed.

"You'd better wait, dear, until you are stronger before you try to think
about business."

But Adelle utterly ignored him, as she was to do henceforth, and
addressed herself singly to her cousin.

"I always thought it was all mine--they said it was. And when I knew
about you, I didn't want to give it up; there isn't as much as there was
because he has lost a good deal. But that makes no difference. Half of
the whole belongs to you and your brothers and sisters. I'll see that
you get it. That's all!"

She lay back exhausted.

The mason remarked,--

"It's rather surprising. But I guess it can wait. It's waited a good
many years."

And after standing by her side and looking down on her dumb, colorless
face a while longer, he left the room.

Archie, who was clearly mystified by his wife's brief statement,
concluded to regard it all as an aberration, an effort on her part to
express fantastically her sense of obligation to the stone mason who had
risked his life to save the child. He was concerned to have Adelle moved
to a more comfortable place and told her that friends were coming to
take her to their home. She made a dissenting gesture without opening
her eyes. She wished to be left alone, entirely alone, here in the
orangery whither she had taken her dead child the night before. Archie,
seeing that h