ehension, and kept utterly silent.

So, their talk being palpably over for this time, Marmaduke Wharne
got up presently to go. They nodded at each other, friendlily, as he
looked back from the door.

Left alone, Mr. Titus Oldways turned in his swivel-chair, around to
his desk beside which he was sitting.

"Next of kin?" he repeated to himself. "God's way?--Well! Afterwards
is a long time. A man must give it up somewhere. Everything escheats
to the king at last."

And he took a pen in his hand and wrote a letter.

V.

HOW THE NEWS CAME TO HOMESWORTH.

"I wish I lived in the city, and had a best friend," said Hazel
Ripwinkley to Diana, as they sat together on the long, red, sloping
kitchen roof under the arches of the willow-tree, hemming towels for
their afternoon "stent." They did this because their mother sat on
the shed roof under the fir, when she was a child, and had told them
of it. Imagination is so much greater than fact, that these
children, who had now all that little Frank Shiere had dreamed of
with the tar smell and the gravel stones and the one tree,--who
might run free in the wide woods and up the breezy hillsides,--liked
best of all to get out on the kitchen roof and play "old times," and
go back into their mother's dream.

"I wish I lived in a block of houses, and could see across the
corner into my best friend's room when she got up in the morning!"

"And could have that party!" said Diana.

"Think of the clean, smooth streets, with red sidewalks, and people
living all along, door after door! I like things set in rows, and
people having places, like the desks at school. Why, you've got to
go way round Sand Hill to get to Elizabeth Ann Dorridon's. I should
like to go up steps, and ring bells!"

"I don't know," said Diana, slowly. "I think birds that build little
nests about anywhere in the cunning, separate places, in the woods,
or among the bushes, have the best time."

"Birds, Dine! It ain't birds, it's people! What has that to do with
it?"

"I mean I think nests are better than martin-boxes."

"Let's go in and get her to tell us that story. She's in the round
room."

The round room was a half ellipse, running in against the curve of
the staircase. It was a bit of a place, with the window at one end,
and the bow at the other. It had been Doctor Ripwinkley's office,
and Mrs. Ripwinkley sat there with her work on summer afternoons.
The door opened out, close at the front, upon