ole panorama of their lives in the
last seconds of consciousness; in the instant's pause that followed the
manager's announcement, Jim saw Five Creeks renovated and prosperous,
and Deb's children running about the old rooms and paddocks, and
calling him father--a home not quite unworthy of his goddess now, and
one that loneliness and poverty would have taught her to appreciate. He
stared at the burly manager like a man in a dream.

"I get a nice little windfall myself, which I never expected," the
latter continued his tale. "The servants are well provided for, and
there are odd sums for a lot of English relatives--I suppose they
are--and a good bit for charities. But yours is the biggest individual
legacy; and I'm glad of it, and I'm not surprised, because I've heard
him many a time speak well of you for the way you worked to keep up
your place and look after the family."

"But," said Jim, coming down from his clouds of glory, "I thought--I
thought there'd be more than that." "Than what? You surely didn't
expect--oh, I see!" The manager threw up his head and roared. "My good
fellow, the estate altogether is worth a quarter of a million."

"Then who--?"

"Gets it? Miss Pennycuick. She's here now. And couldn't believe it when
they told her--though, when you come to think of it, it was a natural
thing for him to do, having been such friends with the old man, and she
his god-daughter. A lucky young woman--my word!" Jim's swelled heart
collapsed and sank like a burst balloon. His dream-house vanished in
thin air, to be built no more.

"That settles it," he said to himself. According to his code of manly
honour and self-respect, a man could not possibly, even with five
thousand pounds in hand, ask a girl with a quarter of a million to
marry him.

A little more conversation, if it can be called such, when one talked
and the other did not even listen, and he parted with the garrulous
manager and rode on to the house. Deb, wet-eyed, met him with a welcome
that severely tried his Spartan fortitude, without in the least
weakening his resolve. Although she did not know it, being still filled
with grief for her lifelong friend, it was the power and command that
he had endowed her with which gave that charming air of fearless and
open affection to her manner.

"Oh, my dear, dear boy!" she addressed him, and all but kissed him
before his mother's eyes. "I am so glad to have you here. Jim dear, Mrs
Urquhart thinks you can be s