Uncle Peter next morning was up to a late breakfast with the stricken family. Percival found him a trifle less bitter, but not less convinced in his despair. The young man himself had recovered his spirits wonderfully. The utter collapse of the old man, always so reliant before, had served to fire all his latent energy. He was now voluble with plans for the future; not only determined to reassure Uncle Peter that the family would be provided for, but not a little anxious to justify the old man's earlier praise, and refute his calumnies of the night before. Mrs. Bines, so complacent overnight, was the most disconsolate one of the group. With her low tastes she was now regarding the loss of the fortune as a calamity to the worthy infants of her own chosen field. "And there, I'd promised to give five thousand dollars to the new home for crippled children, and five thousand to St. John's Guild for the floating hospitals this summer--just yesterday--and I do declare, I just couldn't stay in New York without money, and see those poor babies suffer." "You couldn't stay in New York without money. Mrs. Good-thing," said her son,--"not even if you couldn't see a thing; but don't you welsh on any of your plays--we'll make that ten thousand good if I have to get a sand-bag, and lay out a few of these lads around here some dark night." "But anyway you can't do much to relieve them. I don't know but what it's honester to be poor while the authorities allow such goings on." "You have the makings of a very dangerous anarchist in you, ma. I've seen that for some time. But we're an honest family all right now, with the exception of a few properties that I'll have to sit up with nights--sit right by their sick-beds and wake them up to take their meddy every half hour--" "Now, my son, don't you get to going without your sleep," began his mother. "And wasn't it lucky about my sending that note to George!" said Psyche. "Here in this morning's paper we find he isn't going to be Lord Casselthorpe, after all. What _could_ I have done if we hadn't lost the money?" From which it might be inferred that certain people who had declared Miss Bines to be very hard-headed were not so far wrong as the notorious "casual observer" is very apt to be. "Never you mind, sis," said her brother, cheerfully, "we'll be all right yet. You wait a little, and hear Uncle Peter take back what he's said about me. Uncle Peter, I'll have you taking off that hat of yours every time you get sight of me, in about a year." He went again over the plans. The income from the One Girl was to be used in developing the other properties: the stock ranch up on the Bitter Root, the other mines that had been worked but little and with crude appliances; the irrigation and land-improvement enterprises, and the big timber tracts.