With Mr. Cameron the blow struck deeper, and his Wall Street friends talked together of the old man he had grown since Wilford died, while Katy often found him bending over his long-neglected Bible, as he sat alone in his room at night. And when at last she ventured to speak to him upon the all-important subject, like a little child, he put his hand in hers, and bade her teach him the narrow way which she had found, and wherein Wilford, too, had walked at the very last, they hoped.
For many weeks Katy lingered in New York, and the June roses were blooming when she went back to Silverton, a widow and the rightful owner of all Wilford's ample fortune. They had found among his papers a will, drawn up and executed not long before his illness, and in which Katy was made his heiress, without condition or stipulation. All was hers to do with as she pleased, and the bitterest tears she ever shed were those which fell like rain when she heard how generous Wilford had been. Then, as she thought of Marian, and the life of poverty before her, she crept to Father Cameron's side, and said to him, pleadingly: "Let Genevra share it with me. She needs it quite as much."
Father Cameron would not permit Katy to divide equally with Marian. It was not just, he said; but he did not object to a few thousand going to her, and before Katy left New York for Silverton, she wrote a long, kind letter to Marian, presenting her with ten thousand dollars, which she begged her to accept, not so much as a gift, but as her rightful due. There was a moment's hesitancy on the part of Marian when she read the letter, a feeling that she could not take so much from Katy; but when she looked at the pale sufferers around her, and remembered how many wretched hearts that money would help to cheer, she said: "I will keep it."