'
'Wouldn't they do a lot of damage?'
'I shouldn't mind. I should be too rich to worry about the damage.
If they ruined the place beyond repair I'd go and buy another.'
She laughed. 'It isn't so impossible as it sounds. I came very
near being able to do it.' She paused for a moment, but went on
almost at once. After all, if you cannot confide your intimate
troubles to a fellow bee-lover, to whom can you confide them? 'An
uncle of mine--'
Bill felt himself flushing. He looked away from her. He had a
sense of almost unbearable guilt, as if he had just done some
particularly low crime and was contemplating another.
'--An uncle of mine would have left me enough money to buy all the
farms I wanted, only an awful person, an English lord. I wonder if
you have heard of him?--Lord Dawlish--got hold of uncle somehow
and induced him to make a will leaving all the money to him.'
She looked at Bill for sympathy, and was touched to see that he
was crimson with emotion. He must be a perfect dear to take other
people's misfortunes to heart like that.
'I don't know how he managed it,' she went on. 'He must have
worked and plotted and schemed, for Uncle Ira wasn't a weak sort
of man whom you could do what you liked with. He was very
obstinate. But, anyway, this Lord Dawlish succeeded in doing it
somehow, and then'--her eyes blazed at the recollection--'he had
the insolence to write to me through his lawyers offering me half.
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