“Bosh!” said Stella; “I never took a penny of her money. Papa, I hope, poor old man, had a right to do whatever he liked with his own. She had it all her own way for seven long years. If she had been worth her salt she could have made him do anything she pleased in that time. We used to rely upon that, don’t you remember? And a pretty business it would have been had we had nothing better to trust to. But he never meant to be hard upon Stella, I was always sure of that. Poor old papa! It was nice of him not to change his mind. But I can’t see that Katherine’s is any very hard case, for it was settled like this from the first.” “A wrong thing isn’t made right because it’s been settled from the very first,” said Sir Charles, oracularly. “Don’t be a fool, Charlie. Perhaps you’d like me to give it all away to Kate? It is a good thing for you and your spoiled little monkey Job that I am not such an idiot as that.” “We should have expected our share had she had it,” said Somers always half inaudibly into his moustache. “I daresay. But how different was that! In the first place, she would have had it in trust for me; in the second place, we’re a family and she is a single person. And then she has money of her own; and then, at the end of all, she’s Kate, you know, and I----” “You are Stella,” he cried, with a big laugh. “I believe you; and, by Jove! I suppose that’s the only argument after all!” Stella took this, which seemed to be a compliment, very sedately. “Yes,” she said, “I am Stella; you needn’t recommend Kate’s ways to me, nor mine to Kate; we’ve always been different, and we always will be. If she will marry this man it will save a great deal of trouble. We might make her a nice present--I shouldn’t object to that. We might give her her outfit: some of my things would do quite nicely; they are as good as new and of no use to me; for certainly, whatever happens, we shall never go to that beastly place again.” Sir Charles roared forth a large laugh, overpowered by the joke, though he was not without a touch of shame. “By Jove! Stella, you are the one!” he cried. And a short time after Mr. Sturgeon arrived. He had a great deal of business to do, a great many things to explain. Stella caught with the hereditary cleverness her father had discovered in her the involutions of Mr. Tredgold’s investments, the way in which he had worked one thing by means of or even against another, and in what artful ways he had held the strings. “Blessed if I can make head or tail of it,” said Somers, reduced to partial imbecility by his effort to understand. But Stella sat eager at the table with two red spots on her cheeks, shuffling the papers about and entering into everything. “I should like to work it all myself, if I hadn’t other things to do,” she said. “And excellently well you would do it,” said the lawyer with a bow.