“We were both working. When my parents died, we couldn’t sell the store. There were no takers because it had been closed awhile and there was a supermarket going up on the next block. We disposed of the stock and the fixtures and used that money and their insurances to pay their medical expenses and funerals. His mother gave us a thousand dollars as a wedding present. So we started out with over a thousand dollars in the bank and the incomes from our two jobs, let’s see, sixty and twenty-five dollars a week, plus his GI Bill money. We had to finish paying for the car, which he had bought before we met, and the usual running expenses. He wouldn’t touch the thousand his mother had given us for more than a year. It was a question of getting us saving regularly first.

“He bought stock with it, after he had studied the market. It scared me, I remember, and I think we made seventy-five dollars in four and a half months. I couldn’t keep up with it, so I left it to him.

“The first year we lived in a furnished place, a room and a half. From my parents’ apartment we had taken some things, and that summer we stored them with friends while we went to stay with his mother. We had my teaching salary coming in. What we lost from his job we saved on rent. He needed the two months’ rest, anyway.” She paused.

“Tuesday I told you that we saved steadily. It’s true, but we really did it in a series of jumps. We didn’t pay his mother rent—we bought most of the food, but we would have spent that—and we banked all the surplus, the rent, utilities, and so forth. We used the car as much as possible for our entertainment. The first two springs we had big income tax refunds. Colin did the taxes and he deducted everything he could. He was very good at that. I tried to help the first year, but it just depressed me. He took the time to read all the booklets.

“By the time we broke up, even though he hadn’t worked full-time most of those years, we had twenty-five hundred dollars in the bank.”

“He gave you four thousand,” Leland said.

“He cashed in his insurance and borrowed the rest from his mother.”

He had to be careful with his phrasing. “What did your attorney think of the terms of the settlement?”

“It was all right with him. He had nothing to do. It was worked out before we went to the lawyers. It was an easy fee for my lawyer.”

“MacIver pay for that?”

“Everything.”

“What was his mother’s reaction to the purpose of the loan?”