“All’s well that ends well,” said Sir Charles. “We’ve both had a deuced lot of doubts on that question--between times. Miss Kate, would you mind telling me what kind of a figure it is, this fortune that Stella is supposed to have come into? Hang me if I know; it might be hundreds or it might be thousands. You see I’m a disinterested sort of fellow,” he said, with an uneasy laugh. “The lawyer said,” Katherine explained, “that it could not be under, but might be considerably over, fifty thousand a year.” Sir Charles was silent for a moment and grew very red, which showed up his sunburnt brick-red complexion like a sudden dye of crimson. He caught his breath a little, but with an effort at an indifferent tone repeated, “Fifty thousand pounds!” “A year,” Katherine said. “Well!” cried Stella, “what are you sitting there for, like a stuck pig, staring at me? Need there have been so much fuss about it if it had been less than that? Papa wasn’t a man to leave a few hundreds, was he? I wonder it’s so little, for my part. By the time you’ve got that old barrack of yours done up, and a tidy little house in town, and all our bills paid, good gracious, it’s nothing at all, fifty thousand a year! I hope it will turn out a great deal more, Kate. I daresay your lawyer is the sort of person to muddle half of it away in expenses and so forth. Who is he? Oh, old Sturgeon that used to come down sometimes. Well, he is not up to date, I am sure. He’ll be keeping the money in dreadful consols or something, instead of making the best of it. You can tell him that I shan’t stand that sort of thing. It shall be made the best of if it is going to belong to me.” “And what have you, Miss Kate?” said her brother-in-law, “to balance this fine fortune of Stella’s--for it is a fine fortune, and she knows nothing about it, with her chatter.” “Oh, I know nothing about it; don’t I?” said Stella. “Papa didn’t think so. He said I had a capital head for money, and that I was a chip of the old block, and all that sort of thing. What has Kate got? Oh, she’s got money of her own. I used to envy her so when we were girls. I had a deal more than she had, for papa was always silly about me--dresses and jewels and so forth that I had no business to have at that age; but Kate had money of her own. I could always get plenty from papa, but she had it of her own; don’t you remember, Kate? I always wished to be you; I thought that it was a shame that you should have all that left to you and me nothing. And if you come to that, so it was, for mamma was my mother as well as Kate’s, and she had no business to leave her money to one of us and take no notice of me.” “We are quits now, at all events, Stella,” said Katherine, with the best sort of a smile which she could call up on her face.