She had risen from her knees now, and was standing beside the table, vaguely gazing upon her inheritance. It was all before her. So the Ancient Lady had stood many and many a time counting the money: looking to see if all was safe: content to count it and to know that it was there. The old lady was gone, but from the opposite wall her shoulders and the back of her bonnet were looking on. Well: Armorel might go on doing exactly the same. She might live as her forefathers had lived: there was the flower-farm to provide all their necessities: if it brought in four hundred pounds a year, she could add two hundred to the heap--in every two years and a half another bag of five hundred sovereigns. All her people had done this--why not she? It seemed expected of her; a plain duty laid upon her shoulders. If she were to live on for eighty years longer--which would bring her to her great-great-grandmother's age--she would save eighty times two hundred--sixteen thousand pounds. The inheritance would then be worth thirty-six thousand pounds--a prodigious sum of money indeed. And, besides, the Black Jack, with its foreign gold, and the rings and lace and things! A strange room it was this morning. What voice was it that whispered solemnly in her ear, 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal'? Never before had this injunction possessed any other significance to her than belongs to one manifestly addressed to other people. The Bible is full of warnings addressed to other people. Armorel was like the Royal Duke who used to murmur during the weekly utterance of the Commandments, 'Never did that. Never did that.' Now, this precept was clearly and from the very first intended to meet her own case. Oh! To live for nothing than to add more bags to that tray in the great sea-chest! Roland had prophesied that there would be a change. It had come already in part, and more was coming. What next? As yet the girl did not understand that she was mistress of her own fate. Hitherto things had been done for her. She was now about to act for herself. But how? If Roland were only here! But he had only written once, and he had never kept his promise to write back again to Samson. If he were here he could advise. She looked around, and saw the heaps of things that were all hers, and she laughed. The girl whom Roland thought to be only an ignorant and poor little country girl, a flower-farmer's girl of Samson Island, living alone with her old grandmother and the serving-folk, was ignorant still, no doubt. But she was not poor: she was rich--she could have all that can be bought with money--she was rich. What would Roland say and think? And she laughed aloud.