the bustling, vain old lady of a week ago. She laughed secretly whenever
she recalled the solemn undertaker who had solicited her own aid in
filling out a blank. His first melancholy question, "And thud dame of
the father----" Norma had momentarily supposed to be the beginning of a
prayer, and it had been with an almost hysterical revulsion of feeling
that she had said: "Oh, her father's name? Oh, Francis Dabney Murison."

Wolf, who would not laugh at one tenth of the things that amused Chris,
or that Annie found richly funny, would laugh at these little glimpses
of a formal funeral, Norma knew, and he would remember other odd bits of
reading that were in the same key--from Macaulay, or Henry George, or a
scrap of newspaper that had chanced to be pasted upon an engine-house
wall.

Leslie came into the house late on the afternoon of Friday, and there
was much fresh crying between her and Annie. Leslie had on new black,
too, "just what I could grab down there," she explained--and was pettish
and weary with fatigue and the nervous shock. She gave only the side of
her cheek to Acton's dutiful kiss, and answered his question about the
baby with an impatient, "Oh, heavens, she's all _right_! What could be
the matter with her? She did have a cold, but now she's all right--and
when I'm half-crazy about Grandma and poor Aunt Alice, I do _wish_ you
wouldn't take me up so quickly. I've been travelling all night, and my
head is splitting! If it was _I_ that had the cold, I don't believe
you'd be so fussy!"

"Poor little girl, it's hard for you not to have seen them once more,"
Christopher said, tenderly, failing to meet the half-amused and
half-indignant glance that Norma sent him. Leslie burst into
self-pitying tears, and held tight to his hand, as they all sat down in
Annie's room.

"I believe I feel it most for you, Uncle Chris," she sobbed.

"It changes my life--ends it as surely as it did hers," Chris said,
quietly. "Just now--well, I don't see ahead--just now. After awhile I
believe she'll come back to me--her sweetness and goodness and
bigness--for Alice was the biggest woman, and the finest, that I ever
knew; and then I'll try to live again--just as she would have had me.
And meanwhile, I try to comfort myself that I tried to show her, in
whatever clumsy way I could, that I appreciated her!"

"You not only showed her, you showed all the world, Chris," Annie said,
stretching a hand toward him. Norma felt a sudden upri