standing there,
rushed up into the dressing-room.

This was the way the same sort of news came to Sylvie Argenter as
had come to the baker's daughter. Did it really make any
difference--the different surrounding of the two? The great
house--the lights--the servants--the friends; and the open bake-shop
door, the village street, the blunt, common-spoken neighbor-woman,
and the boy with the brick loaf?

These two were to be fatherless: their mothers were both to be
widows: that was all.

Did it happen strangely with the two--in this same story? Who know,
always, when they are in the same story? These things are happening
every day, and one great story holds us all. If one could see wide
enough, one could tell the whole.

These things happen: and then the question comes,--alike in high and
low places,--alike with money and without it,--what the women and
the girls are to do?

Rodney Sherrett took his sister home; drove three miles round and
brought Mrs. Argenter's sister to her from River Point, and then
turned toward Dorbury Upper Village and the telegraph office. But he
met Sim Atwill on the way, received the telegram from him, and
hurried back.

It was the dispatch of the hour later, and this was it:--

"Mr. Argenter died at five o'clock. His remains will be sent
home to-morrow, carefully attended.

"PHILIP BURKMAYER."

CHAPTER V.

SPILLED OUT AGAIN.

There were paragraphs in the papers; there were resolutions at
meetings of the Board of Trade, and of the Directors of the
Trimountain Bank; there was a funeral from the "late residence,"
largely attended; there were letters and calls of condolence; there
was making of crape and bombazine and silk into "mourning;" there
were friends and neighbors asking each other, after mention of the
sad suddenness, "how it would be;" "how much he had left;" "was
there a will?"

And there was a will; made three years before. One hundred thousand
dollars, outright, to Increase M. Argenter's beloved wife; also the
use of the homestead; fifty thousand dollars to his daughter Sylvia
on her reaching the age of twenty-five, or on her marriage; all else
to be Mrs. Argenter's for her life-time, reverting afterward to
Sylvia or her heirs.

There was just time for this to be ascertained and told of; just
time for Sylvie to be named as an heiress, and then all at once
something else came to light and was told of.

There was a