Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/106

 do in the China trade—or rather, you did," he corrected himself. "Putting the paper in the model was almost the same as destroying it, which he didn't quite want to do. He didn't want to remember it or have it found. He thought he would make the money easily on his next voyage."

"And on his next voyage he was lost," said Jane softly.

"You know all those dates," Mr. Bolliver smiled. "Was it, then, his very next?"

"And he could not have guessed, I suppose," said Miss Lucia, "that his other investments would fail."

"Of course not," Mr. Bolliver replied. "That would have made it very different. He never dreamed for an instant that his children and his children's children would suffer. I can see it all—oh, I know it all." And Mr. Bolliver sighed, with his eyes on phantom jade pagodas and the spell of orange junk-sails in the sunset. "But what's it all mean now?" asked the practical Mark. "Is it worth anything now, that paper?" Mr. Bolliver roused himself.

"Eh? "Worth anything? Of course it is.