hingle.

Allie, I remembered, was Dinky-Dunk's English cousin, Lady Alicia
Elizabeth Newland, who'd made the Channel flight in a navy plane and
the year before had figured in a Devonshire motor-car accident.
Dinky-Dunk had a picture of her, from _The Queen_, up in his study
somewhere, the picture of a very debonair and slender young woman on
an Irish hunter. He had a still younger picture of her in a tweed
skirt and spats and golf-boots, on the brick steps of a Sussex
country-house, with the jaw of a bull-dog resting across her knee. It
was signed and dated and in a silver frame and every time I'd found
myself polishing that oblong of silver I'd done so with a wifely
ruffle of temper.

"How much was it?" I finally asked, still adhering to my role of the
imperturbable chorus.

"She sent out over seven thousand pounds. She wanted it invested out
here."

"Why?"

"Because of the new English taxes, I suppose. She said she wanted a
ranch, but she left everything to me."

"Then it was a trust fund!"

Dinky-Dunk bowed his head, in assent.

"It practically amounted to that," he acknowledged.

"And it's gone?"

"Every penny of it."

"But, Dinky-Dunk," I began. I didn't need to continue, for he seemed
able to read my thoughts.

"I was counting on two full sections for Allie in the Simmond's Valley
tract. That land is worth thirty dollars an acre, unbroken, at any
time. But the bank's swept that into the bag, of course, along with
the rest. The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins--when one
tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I could manage to save
that much for her, out of the ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was
petering out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the city
block--and that sent the whole card-house down."

I had a great deal of thinking to do, during the next minute or two.

"Then isn't it up to us to knuckle down, Dinky-Dunk, and make good on
that Lady Alicia mistake? If we get a crop this year we can--"

But Dinky-Dunk shook his head. "A thousand bushels an acre couldn't
get me out of this mess," he maintained.

"Why not?"

"Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid have already arrived in
Montreal," he quietly announced.

"How do you know that?"

"She wrote to me from New York. She's had influenza, and it left her
with a wheezy tube and a spot on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor
told her to go to Egypt, but she says Egypt's impossible, just now,
and if