Presently he was carrying in the shutters, and in the briskest way, the fire in the kitchen was crackling exhilaratingly, with a little saucepan walloping above it, for Minnie was boiling two eggs,--one for herself this morning, as well as one for him,--and Minnie herself was audible, laying breakfast with the greatest _éclat_. The blow was a sudden and terrible one--but it behoves us to face such things bravely in this sad, unaccountable world. It was quite midday before either of them mentioned the cottages. THE LOST INHERITANCE "My uncle," said the man with the glass eye, "was what you might call a hemi-semi-demi millionaire. He was worth about a hundred and twenty thousand. Quite. And he left me all his money." I glanced at the shiny sleeve of his coat, and my eye travelled up to the frayed collar. "Every penny," said the man with the glass eye, and I caught the active pupil looking at me with a touch of offence. "I've never had any windfalls like that," I said, trying to speak enviously and propitiate him. "Even a legacy isn't always a blessing," he remarked with a sigh, and with an air of philosophical resignation he put the red nose and the wiry moustache into his tankard for a space. "Perhaps not," I said. "He was an author, you see, and he wrote a lot of books." "Indeed!" "That was the trouble of it all." He stared at me with the available eye to see if I grasped his statement, then averted his face a little and produced a toothpick. "You see," he said, smacking his lips after a pause, "it was like this. He was my uncle--my maternal uncle. And he had--what shall I call it?--a weakness for writing edifying literature. Weakness is hardly the word--downright mania is nearer the mark. He'd been librarian in a Polytechnic, and as soon as the money came to him he began to indulge his ambition. It's a simply extraordinary and incomprehensible thing to me. Here was a man of thirty-seven suddenly dropped into a perfect pile of gold, and he didn't go--not a day's bust on it. One would think a chap would go and get himself dressed a bit decent--say a couple of dozen pairs of trousers at a West End tailor's; but he never did. You'd hardly believe it, but when he died he hadn't even a gold watch. It seems wrong for people like that to have money. All he did was just to take a house, and order in pretty nearly five tons of books and ink and paper, and set to writing edifying literature as hard as ever he could write. I _can't_ understand it! But he did. The money came to him, curiously enough, through a maternal uncle of _his_, unexpected like, when he was seven-and-thirty. My mother, it happened, was his only relation in the wide, wide world, except some second cousins of his. And I was her only son. You follow all that? The second cousins had one only son, too, but they brought him to see the old man too soon. He was rather a spoilt youngster, was this son of theirs, and directly he set