I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings
for the lot. My dear father bought them--I should not
be surprised to learn that he bought them at a premium.
If they ever touched a premium for a day, that is
certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy.
Oh, it was too rare! Too inspired! He left nearly
a hundred thousand pounds' worth of paper--that is,
on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I think
it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine
how he got them--but there were actually bonds among
them issued by Kossuth's Hungarian Republic in 1848.
Well--now you can see the kind of inheritance I came into,
and I have a brother and sister more or less to look after,
too."

Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost
exaggerated expression of sympathy upon his face.
The voice in which he spoke now betrayed, however, a certain
note of incredulity.

"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked. "But what I
don't perhaps quite understand--well, this is it.
You have this place of yours in the country, and preserve
game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
It's what you've been saying. What another man would think
a comfortable living, is poverty to a man in your position."

"Oh, the place," said Plowden. "It isn't mine at all.
I could never have kept it up. It belongs to my mother.
It was her father's place; it has been in their family