"The workmen and all the rest of them?" asked Jeckie. "All paid off--gone, weeks since," replied Revis, laconically. "And the stuffs about those shafts--material--the building material at those cottages, and all that?" she inquired. "Sold--to settle things up," said Revis. "Your partner had power to do all that, you know, as you couldn't. We all made the biggest effort we could for you and for her. To put things in a nutshell--you owe nothing to the bank or to anybody, and the whole concern is just a ruin which anybody can take up and remake if they like. I would have liked, but it isn't worth it." Jeckie looked steadily at her visitor for a long time. "Then," she said at last, in a low voice that was curiously firm, "then--I've nothing?" Revis shook his head. "Nothing," he answered. "Nothing! except the forty acres that you bought in the beginning." He was surprised to hear Jeckie laugh. He was something of a student of human nature, this big, bluff man, but he could not gauge the precise meaning of that laugh, and he looked at the woman before him, in some slight alarm, which she was quick to recognise. "I'm not going mad, Revis," she said. "I was only thinking that at the end of all that I've got--forty acres! Those forty acres!" "How much did you give for them?" he asked, inquisitively. "A lot? I'd an idea it was for next to naught that you got them." Jeckie suddenly got up from her chair, and turned towards the hearth. She stood looking into the fire for some time, and when, at last, she glanced at her visitor there was a look in her eyes which Revis never forgot. "What did I give for them?" she said in a low, concentrated voice. "Man!--I don't know--yet!--what I gave for them!" Revis stood staring at her for a moment of wonder. Her answer was beyond him. And as he had no reply to it he turned to go. But Jeckie stopped him. "Wait a minute," she said. "A question--Lucilla Grice and her husband?" "They've left the neighbourhood," replied Revis. "They sold their house and furniture and went away. I don't know where they've gone." Jeckie said no more, and Revis went out, said a few words to Farnish, and drove off. And Farnish went indoors, and found Jeckie already setting about the preparations for their early dinner. He was astonished to find that she began to be talkative that day; still more astonished that, when evening came, she cooked a hot supper, encouraged him to eat, ate heartily herself, and before they went to bed mixed a goodly tumbler of grog for each of them. It was, thought Farnish, like old times, and he went to his chamber in high content. But as the grey dawn broke a few hours later, Farnish woke to find Jeckie, fully dressed, standing at his bedside. He stared at her in astonishment. "Get up; get dressed; come down; we're going away," said Jeckie. "Don't talk, but do as I tell you. There'll be some breakfast ready by the time you're down."