"You don't think so?" Adelle mused, somewhat relieved. After a little time she came safely back to sound earth as was her wont,--"Anyway, it's all different now. I don't want to keep the money. It isn't mine--it never was; never really belonged to me. Perhaps that was why I spent it so badly.... I want you to have your share as soon as possible." The fire had done its work, she might have said, if not in one way, at least in another. The result was that she no longer desired to thwart the workings of law and justice, of right as she knew it. She wished to divest herself as quickly as possible of that which properly belonged to another. After all, her money had not brought her much! Why should she cling to it? The mason was still doubtful and observed frowningly,-- "It's a mighty long time since grandfather left Alton--more'n fifty years." "Clark's Field has only been put on the market for a little over ten years," Adelle remarked. "They couldn't do it before, as I told you." "But it's been settled now," the mason demurred. "I don't know the law, but it must be queer if the property could hang fire all these years and be growing richer all the time." "Alton is a big city now where the old Clark farm was," Adelle explained. "I suppose it's growed considerable." Then both were silent. The mason's mind was turbulent with feelings and thoughts. Across the glorious reach of land and sky before his eyes there opened a vision of radiant palaces and possessions, all that money could buy to appease the desires of a starved life. "My folks will be some surprised," he remarked at last, with his ironical laugh. "I suppose so," Adelle replied seriously. "You'll have to explain it to them. How many brothers and sisters have you?" "There are five of us left," Clark said. "I'm sorry mother has gone. She would have liked mighty well having a bit of ready money for herself. She never had much of a time in her life," he added, thinking of the hard-working wife and mother who had died in poverty after struggling against odds for fifty years. "It'll mean a good deal, too, to Will and Stan, I guess;--they've got families, you know." Adelle listened with a curious detachment to the happiness that her magic lamp might bestow when handed over to the other branch of the family. "Money doesn't always mean so much," she remarked, with a deep realization of the platitude which so many people repeat hypocritically. The mason looked at her skeptically out of his blue eyes. That was the sort of silly pretense the rich or well-to-do often got off for the benefit of their poorer neighbors--he read stories like that in the newspapers and magazines. But he knew that the rich usually clung to all their possessions, in spite of their expressed conviction, at times, of the inadequacy of material things to provide them with happiness. He was quite ready for his part, having experienced the other side, to run the risks of property!