When she spoke, her voice sounded as if it came out of the wildness of
a surging wreck.
"Then that's what you meant in saying yesterday that when everything was
settled you still wouldn't be able to pay all you owed."
"That's what I meant--exactly."
He lay perfectly still, except that he raised his hand and puffed at his
extinct cigar. She looked down at the pattern on the Persian rug beside
his couch--a symmetrical scroll of old rose, on a black ground sown with
multicolored flowerets.
"I suppose it's the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs you owe the money
to?"
"And the Compton heirs, and old Miss Burnaby, and the two Misses Brown,
and--"
"Haven't they anything left?"
"Oh yes. It isn't all gone, by any means." Then he added, as if to make
a clean breast of the affair and be done with it: "The personal
property--what you may call the cash--is mostly gone! Those that have
owned real estate--like the Rodmans and Fanny Burnaby--well, they've got
that still."
"I see." She continued to sit looking meditatively down at the rug. "I
suppose," she ventured, after long thinking, "that that's the money
we've been living on all these years?"
"Yes; in the main.
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