“I leave everything—­everything, in your hands,” murmured the grateful father.

“By the way”—­as an after-thought—­“what about your little girl?”

She was not a little girl now, and had finished with school; but, oh, the boon that a few good lessons in music and languages would be to her!

That matter was settled.

“Well, now,” said Deb, “we must think about Mary.  She is frightfully thin.  I can see that she has had too many worries, as you say.  She must be taken out of them.  I want to have her at Redford with me—­as soon as she can get ready—­and give her a good long rest, and feed her up, and make her fat and strong.”

“I only wish you could prevail on her,” he sighed.  “But I am afraid you will not get her to go anywhere without me.  I have a devoted wife, Miss Pennycuick”—­even if she had not tacitly forbidden “Deborah” in her poor days, he would not have ventured upon the liberty now that she was rich—­“too devoted, if that can be.  She insists upon sharing all my burdens, though I fain would spare her.  I know well that, say what I will, she will never consent to leaving me to struggle with them alone.”

“You have not told me what they are,” said Deb, who saw that he was in dread of her going before he could do so.

“Oh, debts—­debts—­debts!” he answered, with a reckless air.  “The millstone that we hung about our necks when we anticipated that she would have money, and lived accordingly, and were then left stranded.  The eternal trying to make a shilling go as far as a pound—­to make bricks without straw, like the captive Israelites of old.  But why do you ask me?  I hate to talk about it.”  He made a gesture of putting the miserable subject aside.

“It was very hard on you,” Deb said gently—­contradicting the Deb of an earlier time and different state of things—­“to have those expectations, which were certainly justified, and to be disappointed as you were.  I feel that we Pennycuicks were to blame in that—­”

“Oh, dear, no!” he earnestly assured her.

“And that an obligation rests on me, now that I have the means, to make some compensation to you—­to Mary, rather.”

“It is like you to think of that.  But really—­”

“And I put a blank cheque in my pocket, and a stylographic pen—­and will you let me”—­she drew forth the articles mentioned, and made a desk of the top rail of the gate—­“will you do me the favour to accept from me—­what shall I say?—­five hundred pounds?  Would that relieve you—­and Mary—­of the immediate worries?”

He said it would, with the mental reservation that it did not amount to what he had been defrauded of by Mr Pennycuick (she had made a mistake in the designation of her gift); but the slight coolness of his acknowledgement quickly gave place to grateful fervour as he realised what the immediate five hundred pounds would do for him, and read in her words an implication that the sum was but an instalment of what she felt to be his due.  He was incoherent in his thanks and benedictions as he slipped the cheque into his pocket.