d back against the
open door and stared out with horror-stricken eyes across the common to
Dolly Leonard's house, where every window was blazing with calamity.

"Dead?" I gasped again. "Dead? What happened?"

The postman eyed me with quizzical fatherliness. "Ask your mother," he
answered, reluctantly, and I turned and groped my way leaden-footed up
the stairs, muttering, "Oh, mother, mother, I don't _need_ to ask you."

When I got back to my room at last through a tortuous maze of gaping
workmen and sickening flowers, three startled girls jumped up to catch
me as I staggered across the threshold. I did not faint, I did not cry
out. I just sat huddled on the floor rocking myself to and fro, and
mumbling, as through a mouthful of sawdust: "Dolly Leonard is dead.
Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead."

I will not attempt to describe too fully the scene that followed. There
were seven of us, you know, and we were only eighteen, and no young
person of our acquaintance had ever died before. Indeed, only one aged
death had ever disturbed our personal life history, and even that remote
catastrophe had sent us scampering to each other's beds a whole winter
long, for the individual fear of "seeing things at night."

"Dolly Leonard is dead." I can feel myself yet in that huddled news-heap
on the floor. A girl at the mirror dropped her hand-glass with a
shivering crash. Some one on the sofa screamed. The only one of us who
was dressed began automatically to unfasten her lace collar and strip
off her silken gown, and I can hear yet the soft lush sound of a folded
sash, and the strident click of the little French stays that pressed too
close on a heaving breast.

Then some one threw wood on the fire with a great bang, and then more
wood and more wood, and we crowded round the hearth and scorched our
faces and hands, but we could not get warm enough.

Dolly Leonard was not even in our set. She was an older girl by several
years. But she was the belle of the village. Dolly Leonard's gowns,
Dolly Leonard's parties, Dolly Leonard's lovers, were the envy of all
womankind. And Dolly Leonard's courtship and marriage were to us the
fitting culmination of her wonderful career. She was our ideal of
everything that a girl should be. She was good, she was beautiful, she
was irresistibly fascinating. She was, in fact, everything that we
girlishly longed to be in the revel of a ballroom or the white sanctity
of a church.

And now