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 Simeon Peake left his daughter Selina a legacy of two fine clear blue-white diamonds (he had had the ‘gambler’s love of them) and the sum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars in cash. Just how he had managed to have a sum like this put by was a mystery. The envelope containing it had evidently once held a larger sum. It had been sealed, and then slit. On the outside was written, in Simeon Peake’s fine, almost feminine hand: “For my little daughter Selina Peake in case anything should happen to me.” It bore a date seven years old. What the original sum had been no one ever knew. That any sum remained was evidence of the almost heroic self-control practised by one to whom money—ready money in any sum at all—meant only fuel to feed the flames of his gaming fever.

To Selina fell the choice of earning her own living or of returning to the Vermont village and becoming a withered and sapless dried apple, with black fuzz and mould at her heart, like her aunts, the Misses Sarah and Abbie Peake. She did not hesitate.

“But what kind of work?” Julie Hempel demanded. “What kind of work can you do?” Women—that is, the Selina Peakes—did not work.

“I—well, I can teach.”

“Teach what?”

“The things I learned at Miss Fister’s.”

Julie’s expression weighed and discredited Miss Fister. “Who to?” Which certainly justified her expression.