"No trouble about that," she answered, calmly; "I've written Mr. Otway I wish to realize on some Baltima' and Ohio bonds." He turned sharply in his restless walk, and looked at her with curious emotion. Then, quite low: "This is about the last of them, isn't it?" "Oh, there is my share of Valeria's still left." He turned away, and continued his walk. His mother watched him covertly. "The waste of it, the futility," he muttered, "bolstering up a wreck, instead of launching new ships. The very savages are wiser. _They_ don't stint the young to feed the useless, the dying." "Don't talk nonsense." She looked very angry. "It's the rotten place in civilization," he went on, with some excitement--"skin-deep sentimentality, and a careless cruelty reaching down to the core of things. Devices of every kind to keep the unfit here, while the young and strong starve in the streets. Hospitals for the hopeless, not even bread for the ambitious--" "Where is Emmeline?" interrupted Mrs. Gano, looking down the long room towards Val. "I don't know." "Go and find her, and don't make her cry. I'll call you both when I want you." The next time that Emmie wept because she couldn't have something she saw in a store window, Val realized it was time that she should be taken into her confidence. When they were alone: "Now, can you keep a famerly secret?" "Yes." "Cross your heart, and hope you may die if you ever tell." Emmie complied with these requirements. "Well, we're pore, all of us--gran'ma, too--awful, awful pore, and you mustn't hurt their feelin's askin' for green hats and things." "'Tain't so. Gamma ain't pore." "I tell you she is." "Why"--Emmie laughed her silvery little laugh, and showed her small white teeth bewitchingly--"she's got a ole hair-trunk full o' money." "_N-o-o-o!_" "Yes, she has. I found a dusty ten-dollar bill in the fat blue china vase, and I 'minded her of it when she said she couldn't get me the red cloak at Alexander's, you know." "Yes, yes, yes; what'd she say?" "Said the little trunk in the pack-room was full of bills like that, but all the same, I couldn't have the red cloak at Alexander's; that's why I _always_ cry when I see it"--Emmie wound up with the air of one who takes a lawful pride in accomplishing a mission--"'cause with a trunk full o' money there's no excuse." Here was news. Was she a miser, then? The very thought was enough to make one spin with excitement, and the growing belief that it was so kept Val "going," so to speak, for many a cheerful week. There came a day when, after taking oaths of the most binding and blasphemous character, Julia Otway was let into the "famerly secret." She was obviously disappointed that all this preparation led up to so little.