"I could let you have all you want. It would be such a beautiful thing
for me, Joe. Oh, I know how you'd feel; you wouldn't even let me give
you that dollar I found in the street last year; but this would be only
lending it to you, and you could pay me back sometime--"
"Ariel!" he exclaimed, and, setting his empty cup upon the floor, took
her by the shoulders and shook her till the empty plate which had held
the toast dropped from her hand and broke into fragments. "You've been
reading the Arabian Nights!"
"No, no," she cried, vehemently. "Grandfather would give me anything.
He'll give me all the money I ask for!"
"Money!" said Joe. "Which of us is wandering? MONEY? Roger Tabor give
you MONEY?"
"Not for a while. A great many things have to be settled first."
"What things?"
"Joe," she asked, earnestly, "do you think it's bad of me not to feel
things I OUGHT to feel?"
"No."
"Then I'm glad," she said, and something in the way she spoke made him
start with pain, remembering the same words, spoken in the same tone,
by another voice, the night before on the veranda. "I'm glad, Joe,
because I seemed all wrong to myself. Uncle Jonas died last night, and
I haven't been able to get sorry. Perhaps it's because I've been so
frightened about you, but I think not, for I wasn't sorry even before
Colonel Flitcroft told me about you."
"Jonas Tabor dead!" said Joe. "Why, I saw him on the street yesterday!"
"Yes, and I saw him just before I came out on the porch where you were.
He was there in the hall; he and Judge Pike had been having a long
talk; they'd been in some speculations together, and it had all turned
out well. It's very strange, but they say now that Uncle Jonas's heart
was weak--he was an old man, you know, almost eighty,--and he'd been
very anxious about his money. The Judge had persuaded him to risk it;
and the shock of finding that he'd made a great deal suddenly--"
"I've heard he'd had that same shock before," said Joe, "when he sold
out to your father."
"Yes, but this was different, grandfather says. He told me it was in
one of those big risky businesses that Judge Pike likes to go into.
And last night it was all finished, the strain was over, and Uncle
Jonas started home. His house is only a little way from the Pikes',
you know; but he dropped down in the snow at his own gate, and some
people who were going by saw him fall. He was dead before grandfather
got there."
"I can't be sorry," said Joe, slowly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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