"Blest if I know, or any one else!" he grunted. "And what's more, I don't believe _she_ lost it all, either. I think it was her father and her brother before her that did the trick. They were great folks around here,--high and mighty, we called 'em. Nobody among us down at the village was good enough for 'em. This here Miss Camilla,--her mother died when she was a baby--she used to spend most of her time in New York with a wealthy aunt. Some swell, she was!--used to go with her aunt pretty nigh every year to Europe and we didn't set eyes on her once in a blue moon. Her father and brother had a fine farm and were making money, but she didn't care for this here life. "Well, one time she come back from Europe and things didn't seem to be going right down here at her place. I don't know what it was, but there were queer things whispered about the two men folks and all the money seemed to be gone suddenly, too. I was away at the time on a three-years' cruise, so I didn't hear nothin' about it till long after. But they say the brother he disappeared and never came back, and the father died suddenly of apoplexy or something, and Miss Camilla was left to shift for herself, on a farm mortgaged pretty nigh up to the hilt. "She was a bright woman as ever was made, though, I'll say that for her, and she kept her head in the air and took to teaching school. She taught right good, too, for a number of years and got the mortgages off the farm. And then, all of a sudden, she began to get deaf-like, and couldn't go on teaching. Then she took to selling off a lot of their land lying round, and got through somehow on that, for a while. But times got harder and living higher priced, and finally she had to give up trying to keep the whole thing decent and just scrooged herself into those little quarters in the 'L.' She's made a good fight, but she never would come down off her high horse or ask for any help or let any one into what happened to her folks." "How long ago was all that?" asked Doris. "Oh, about forty or fifty years, I should think," he replied, after a moment's thought. "Yes, fifty or more, at the least." "You say they owned a lot of land around their farm?" interrogated Doris, casually. "Surest thing! One time old Caleb Roundtree owned pretty nigh the whole side of the river up that way, but he'd sold off a lot of it himself before he died. She owned a good patch for a while, though, several hundred acres, I guess. But she hain't got nothin' but what lies right around the house, now." "Didn't you ever hear what happened to the brother?" demanded Doris.