He smiled. “Many thousands,” he replied. “They’d come from fifty miles around, a hundred miles—everyone begging, like these old people in my night classes, to learn how to read and write. They want _knowledge_, Ma’am! They want up—they want _out_! If you could help in that—I don’t think you’d feel ‘worthless,’ ever again! Whether you ever did that or not, you mustn’t ever say that word again. At least, you’ve given one man, once hopeless, his hope and his chance—and his dreams, we’ll say. I’ve had quite some dreams, you see.”
“Fifteen or twenty thousand dollars would go quite a way toward making a building of that sort?”
“There’s not been fifty dollars put into our building, I suppose, Ma’am,” said he. “Twenty thousand dollars—that’s more money than there is in all this county. But there’s twenty thousand millions in sight of where we sit.”
She turned to him contritely—“It’s plain enough what my husband and his Company wanted to do with these people—they wanted to steal away their very birthright, before they were wise enough to know its value. It wouldn’t be charity for me—it wouldn’t be even a gift. It wouldn’t be a fraction of what you have owing to you from me and mine.
“And it might be done too,” she went on shrewdly. “With the Johnston and Bulkley and Oddingham holdings, my husband’s estate would pretty nearly control the Land Company’s affairs—they would vote with me, I’m sure. So maybe, you see”—smiling for almost the first time in all these weeks—“it was in my destiny to come here?”
“It may have been,” said David Joslin simply.
She ran on eagerly now. “We’ll have a church up there too, some time. Couldn’t you be the preacher some time, Mr. Joslin? And of course you’ll be president of the college. Listen at me talking! I’m just like a child.
“But you don’t answer,” she said, looking at him keenly. He was staring out steadily. Gaunt, with sunken eyes and prominent cheekbones, worn and drawn by the long hours of labor bodily and mental, David Joslin was not a handsome man, nor did even physical well-being seem vouchsafed to him now. He was sad, very sad. It seemed to her she had never seen a face so sad as his.
“Of course,” she reiterated, “you’ll be the president. You’ll have to preach—no one else could.”
