usband, like a rainbow spanning a black departing cloud. And thus, with
fleet-footed Kate in the van proclaiming the peace, and three prattling
children clinging to their hands and clothes, they passed out into life to
begin it anew. And bench and Bureau, with sudden emotion, hopelessly
irrational and altogether hopeful and good, cheered them on their way.

LIFE'S BEST GIFT

Margaret Kelly is dead, and I need not scruple to call her by her own
name. For it is certain that she left no kin to mourn her. She did all the
mourning herself in her lifetime, and better than that when there was
need. She nursed her impetuous Irish father and her gentle English mother
in their old age--like the loving daughter she was--and, last of all, her
only sister. When she had laid them away, side by side, she turned to face
the world alone, undaunted, with all the fighting grit of her people from
both sides of the Channel. If troubles came upon her for which she was no
match, it can be truly said that she went down fighting. And who of her
blood would ask for more?

What I have set down here is almost as much as any one ever heard about
her people. She was an old woman when she came in a way of figuring in
these pages, and all that lay behind her.

Of her own past this much was known: that she had once been an exceedingly
prosperous designer of dresses, with a brown-stone house on Lexington
Avenue, and some of the city's wealthiest women for her customers.
Carriages with liveried footmen were not rarely seen at her door, and a
small army of seamstresses worked out her plans. Her sister was her
bookkeeper and the business head of the house. Fair as it seemed, it
proved a house of cards, and with the sister's death it fell. One loss
followed another. Margaret Kelly knew nothing of money or the ways of
business. She lost the house, and with it her fine clients. For a while
she made her stand in a flat with the most faithful of her sewing-women to
help her. But that also had to go when more money went out than came in
and nothing was left for the landlord. Younger rivals crowded her out. She
was stamped "old-fashioned," and that was the end of it. Her last friend
left her. Worry and perplexity made her ill, and while she was helpless in
Bellevue Hospital, being in a ward with no "next friend" on the books,
they sent her over to the Island with the paupers. Against this indignity
her proud spirit arose and made the body forget its ill