“Mother, you tell me what all this means, won’t you?” This from Jess in almost a desperate tone.

“Yes, you may as well all know now,” said Mrs. Pell, sinking into a chair.  “I find that half of the town seems to be aware of it already.”

“It!  It!  Quick, mother.  It isn’t something awful, is it?”

“No, not awful for us my dears.  It is just this.  Your brother Roy touched old Mr. Tyler’s heart by what he did for him yesterday, and in the will he made last night he left all his fortune, about half a million, to me.”

Both girls sat there as if stricken dumb, staring at their mother as she told them the wonderful news.

CHAPTER VI

 Rex goes to town

“I’m very sorry, indeed, this came out now.  It seems unfeeling to talk about it while that poor old man’s body is above ground, and then the amount of the fortune he possessed may be grossly exaggerated.”

This was Mrs. Pell’s summary of the matter, delivered several times during that afternoon.  The girls took the thing very quietly.

“I am so glad on Syd’s account,” Eva said though more than once.  “He has always worked so hard for us.”

Jess seemed dazed by the possibility of the new order of things, while Roy was disinclined to talk about it at all.  Rex, however, made up for the apparent apathy of the others.

At lunch he wanted to know when they were going to move.

“Of course we don’t want to go on staying in a bandbox of a place like this, when mother is a millionaire,” he said.

“Only half a one,” Jess corrected him with a smile.

“Well, no matter about that.  I’ve been figuring up on the income that we could get without touching the principal, and I make it $25,000 a year.”

“Oh, Reggie, Reggie, I am afraid you are incorrigible,” groaned his mother.

“Why, I don’t see anything out of the way in doing a little calculating here in the privacy of our home.  I don’t go up and proclaim it from the housetops.”

“But you may be reckoning without your host, my dear brub,” interposed Jess.  “What if Mr. Tyler had only a thousand in bank instead of five hundred thousand?”

“Yes; we can’t know anything certain till Syd comes home to-night,” added Roy.

“I can’t wait for that,” muttered Rex, under his breath.

He subsided for the rest of his meal, however, but as soon as he had finished went up to his room and proceeded to go through all the pockets of his different suits.

“Short by a quarter,” he murmured as he finally sat down on the edge of the bed and jingled the small change he had collected, “I’ll have to go to mother after all.”

He glanced up at a time-table stuck in the mirror, hurriedly changed his knockabout suit for his best one, and then rushed down to the dining room where Mrs. Pell was helping Eva shell peas for dinner.