es, you know. The brother-in-law isn't
much, I imagine."

"Stephen A. Lowndes? No. Broken-down and out of the world. He
couldn't advise to any purpose. I fancy Argenter has been holding
_him_ up."

"I think they'll be very glad to see you, sir."

Rodney drove his father over the next night. Mr. Sherrett went in
alone. Rodney sat in the chaise outside.

Mr. Sherrett waited some minutes after he had sent up his card, and
then Sylvie came down to him, looking pale in her black dress, and
with the trouble really in her young eyes, over which the brows bent
with a strange heaviness.

"I could not persuade mother to come down," she said. "She does not
feel able to see anybody. But I wanted to thank you for coming, Mr.
Sherrett."

"I thought an old neighbor might venture to ask if he could be of
use. A lady needs some one to talk things over with. I know your
mother must have much to think of, and she cannot have been used to
business. I should not come for a mere call at such a time. I should
be glad to be of some service."

"Would you be kind enough to sit down a few minutes and talk with
me, Mr. Sherrett?"

There was a difference already between the Sylvie of to-day and the
Sylvie of a few weeks ago. It was no longer a question of little
nothings,--of how she should get people in and how she could get
them out,--of what she should do and say to seem "nice all through,"
like Amy Sherrett. Mr. Sherrett had not come for a "mere call," as
he said; and there was no mere "receiving." The llama lace and the
gray silk and the small _savoir faire_ could not help her now. Mrs.
Argenter was up-stairs in a black tamise wrapper with a large plain
black shawl folded about her, as she lay in the chill of a suddenly
cool August evening, on the sofa in her dressing-room, which for the
last week or two she had rarely left. All at once, Sylvie found that
she must think and speak both for her mother and herself.

Mrs. Argenter could run smoothly in one polished groove; she was
thrown out now, and to her the whole world was off its axis. Her
House that Jack built had tumbled down; she thought so, not
accepting this strange block that had come to be wrought in. She had
been counting little brick after little brick that she had watched
idly in the piling; now there was this great weight that she could
not deal with, laid upon her hands for bearing and for using; she
let it crush her down, not knowing that, fitting it bravely into her