'Confound it all!' cried John with sudden irritation. 'Isn't this just like life! To hold out the rope, just to grab it away again with a grin--I won't, I say. What is mine is mine.' 'But it isn't yours.' 'Did Frank have any children?' he asked. 'Several, I believe,' admitted Emily reluctantly. 'And he never got on?' 'He never got on.' 'And the twenty thousand might save their pesky little Mexican souls.' The child's laughter rippled out across the shocked silence of the elders. 'Maybe Uncle John left them something,' suggested Emily. 'For a man who tried such big things this doesn't seem much money.' Her brother shook his head. '"The entire sum of which he stands possessed,"' he read from the lawyer's letter. 'You might make a few inquiries through the post. I rather imagine the Mexican mail service isn't very trustworthy,' suggested Aunt Mary, hopefully. He looked at her, but in abstracted fashion, as if it were not to Aunt Mary that he was listening. 'I'll write to this Oklahoma lawyer, and then I must go to Mexico.' 'Isn't it a little quixotic?' 'It's most likely all kinds of foolishness, like everything else I do,' groaned the man. 'But it's what I'd want done for my little chap if I were dead and he alive, and I had quarreled with him. I suppose I could keep this money and save my skin, but--' 'You couldn't keep it without finding out,' murmured Alice, 'because you are you, and the real you is incapable of doing a mean thing.' 'You must do as you think best,' said Emily at last. 'Maybe, if you find Frank, he won't want it all, but will divide, knowing that his father willed it to you.' 'That may be as it may be,' said the man, leaning back in his chair with the face of one listening. 'But I go to Mexico. It's a queer game we play here, and I'll be dashed if I can understand it, but I'm going to play it as fairly as I know how.' * * * * * So the voice of Alice won, of Alice, who had been dead for five long years. THE MARBLE CHILD BY E. NESBIT All over the pavement of the church spread the exaggerated cross-hatching of the old pews' oak, a Smithfield market of intersecting lines such as children made with cards in the old days when kings and knaves had fat legs bulging above their serviceable feet, and queens had skirts to their gowns and were not cut across their royal middles by mirrors reflecting only the bedizened torso of them and the charge--heart, trefoil, or the like--in the right-hand top corner of the oblong that framed them. The pew had qualities: tall fat hassocks, red cushions, a comparative seclusion, and, in the case of the affluent, red curtains drawn at sermon-time.