a good many years her senior. But we both faithfully tried to make the
best of our mistake, not the worst, and I think this effort helped us to
respect each other, when there couldn't be any question of more. He was
a rich man, and he had made his money out of nothing, or, at least, from
a beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of
its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have.
He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated,
and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had
a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one
would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a
burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he
was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that
money was an evil in itself."

"That is what we think," I ventured.

"Yes, I know. But he had thought this out for himself, and yet he had
times when his thinking about it seemed to him a kind of craze, and, at
any rate, he distrusted himself so much that he died leaving it all
to me. I suppose he thought that perhaps I could learn how to give it
without hurting; and then he knew that, in our state of things, I must
have some money to keep the wolf from the door. And I am afraid to part
with it, too. I have given and given; but there seems some evil spell on
the principal that guards it from encroachment, so that it remains the
same, and, if I do not watch, the interest grows in the bank, with that
frightful life dead money seems endowed with, as the hair of dead, people
grows in the grave."

"Eveleth!" her mother murmured again.