The news travelled fast and before dark Wex had been advised to sell his circus, to run it on shares, to have the animals killed and stuffed as a nucleus for a village museum. He was assured of success, warned of ignominious failure, congratulated on his luck and condoled with for the burden laid upon him. He was admonished that it was his Christian duty to refuse the legacy, and told by his next visitor that he would be a darn fool if he did. He had aged visibly when he reached home, where he knew the news had preceded him by the voice of his mother in the kitchen, high and shrill above the sputter of the frying fat. She stood, hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed, fork in hand, talking to some one in the back door. "Well," she was saying, decidedly, "there was never a Snathers yit, far as I know, that even went to a circus, and no son of mine shall own one if I have _my_ say." The answering voice was as decided as her own, provokingly cool and deliberate, but the sweetest of all sounds to the anxious eavesdropper. He flushed to the roots of his sandy hair and clutched nervously at his stubby beard. It was Sade's voice. She had heard the news and had run in the back way, in neighbourly village fashion, to ask if it were really true. He waited breathlessly for her answer:-- "And _I_ think Wex'd feel he was flying straight into the face of Providence not to make all he could out of it, even if he had to run it himself for awhile." Then, startled by the sneeze that betrayed Wexley's presence, she said good-bye so hurriedly that he had only a glimpse of a white sunbonnet, fluttering around the corner. Armed with this sanction, Wexley called that evening at the Cooper cottage, where Sade kept house for a decrepit great-aunt. But she had heard wild rumours in the meantime--the possibility of his adopting the armless dwarf and the wild twins of Borneo, in case the show business did not pay. But on being anxiously assured that there was nothing whatever to fear in that direction if she would only marry him, she confessed that she did not approve of his running a circus any more than his mother did. It was only her chronic disability to agree with old Mis' Snathers that made her say it.