Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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Three generations of Wests had lived from this farm until, some forty years before, its hundred acres being all too small for the needs of modern push and life, the last young male of the family, a man of twenty odd, of tenacious mixed Scotch and New England stock, had gone to New York to follow a quicker game of dollars.

In due course, when Adam Lawton’s parents died, his mother having been a West and the homestead her portion, he found himself absorbed in the beginnings of money-making, yet somewhere in him was a deep-buried sentiment for his boyhood’s home, stern though the life and discipline had been, and even though he found no leisure to revisit it. He therefore had installed his maternal cousin Keith in it as guardian, paying the taxes and for such improvements and repairs as kept it apace with the times. Then he promptly forgot it, except on pay days, when he justified himself to himself, the Scotch thrift in him insisting on justification, for the comparatively slight outlay, by saying half aloud to his private secretary, who did the forwarding, “A snug little place, and always worth a price; my daughter fancies it, and perhaps some day, who knows, I may like to go back there for a rest.”