Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/191

 very peculiar about his having hidden his wealth so nor would she consider it out of the picture even to learn that he had made a cryptogram of the solution to the puzzle  that he had hidden the answer somewhere in a book. But how to find it?

The more Jessica pondered on the matter, the more she became convinced that there was a distinct possibility that the money was hidden somewhere down here, on this great estate. In fact, a probability. If a man was trying to hide a great sum of money, where could he find a better place? Trust her father to think of that. Not that he wanted to die without letting his daughter know where the money was. He loved her, she knew, and he would be greatly grieved to know that she was in need of money. But he had this in common with all men—he did not expect to die. Human beings, to a large extent, consider themselves immortal. That is, they can visualize death—of course, one must come to that in the end—but somehow, it was something that never happened to one personally. It was something that happens to everybody, death but to one’s self. That is one of the singular psychological twists that make the way of the life insurance agent very hard indeed. If old Peter Pomeroy had thought that he was to die suddenly, he would have taken immediate steps to acquaint his daughter with the facts of the whereabouts of his money—always conceding, she murmured, that they were not mistaken, and that money really existed.

So Jessica Pomeroy at length fell asleep.