ime, and he had gone to read
it to some manager or other. Edith was already spending the royalties.

"We could go a little ways out of town," she was saying, "and we could
have an automobile; Margery says theirs will be sold, and it will
certainly be a bargain. Jack, are you laughing at me?"

"Certainly _not_," I replied gravely. "Dream on, Edith. Shall we train
the boys as chauffeurs, or shall we buy in the Fleming man, also cheap."

"I am sure," Edith said aggrieved, "that it costs more for horse feed
this minute for your gray, Jack, than it would for gasolene."

"But Lady Gray won't eat gasolene," I protested. "She doesn't like it."

Edith turned her back on me and sewed. Near me, Mrs. Butler had
languidly taken up the paper; suddenly she dropped it, and when I
stooped and picked it up I noticed she was trembling.

"Is it true?" she demanded. "Is Robert Clarkson dead?"

"Yes," I assented. "He has been dead since Sunday morning--a suicide."

Edith had risen and come over to her. But Mrs. Butler was not fainting.

"I'm glad, glad," she said. Then she grew weak and semi-hysterical,
laughing and crying in the same breath. When she had been helped
up-stairs, for in her weakened state it had been more of a shock than we
realized, Margery came down and we tried to forget the scene we had just
gone through.

"I am glad Fred was not here," Edith confided to me. "Ellen is a lovely
woman, and as kind as she is mild; but in one of her--attacks, she is a
little bit trying."

It was strange to contrast the way in which the two women took their
similar bereavements. Margery represented the best type of normal
American womanhood; Ellen Butler the neurasthenic; she demanded
everything by her very helplessness and timidity. She was a constant
drain on Edith's ready sympathy. That night, while I closed the
house--Fred had not come in--I advised her to let Mrs. Butler go back to
her sanatorium.

At twelve-thirty I was still down-stairs; Fred was out, and I waited
for him, being curious to know the verdict on the play. The bell rang a
few minutes before one, and I went to the door; some one in the
vestibule was tapping the floor impatiently with his foot. When I opened
the door, I was surprised to find that the late visitor was Wardrop.

He came in quietly, and I had a chance to see him well, under the hall
light; the change three days had made was shocking. His eyes were sunk
deep in his head, his reddened lids and twitchi