Miss Carmagee sat crying at the breakfast-table over a letter that she held in her fat, white hand. It was a letter from Catherine, and told of the last resting-place of Gwen, a narrow bed of clay amid white headstones on the Wilson hills. She had been reading the letter aloud to her brother, whose face was a study in the irritable suppression of his feelings.

“Damn that bird!”

The canary in its cage by the window was filling the room with shivers of shrill sound. Porteus pushed his chair back, jerked an antimacassar from the sofa, and flung it over the bird’s cage.

“Go on, dear, go on. I am expecting Dixon to see me in ten minutes.”

Miss Carmagee wiped her spectacles, and blundered on brokenly through the letter. There were eight pages, closely written, and whether it was the indistinctness of Catherine’s writing, or the dimness of Miss Carmagee’s eyes, the old lady’s progress was sluggish in the extreme. She had forgotten to add milk to her untasted cup of tea, and the rashers of bacon on her plate were congealing into unappetizing grease.

Porteus sat fidgeting at the far end of the table. The vitality of his interest betrayed itself in a frowning and jerky spirit of impatience.

“Well, what are they going to do now, eh? Stay on and lose the boy? Murchison ought to have more sense.”

Miss Carmagee’s eyes had assumed an expression of moist surprise behind her spectacles. She appeared to be digesting some unexpected piece of news in silence, and with the amiable forgetfulness of a lethargic mind.

Porteus had handed her his empty cup. Some seconds elapsed before his sister noticed the intrusion of the china.

“Dear, what a coincidence!”

She took the cup and filled it mechanically, her eyes still fixed upon the letter.

“Well, what is it?”

“If only it had happened earlier, the money would have been of use.”

Mr. Porteus betrayed the natural impatience of the energetic male.

“Bless my soul, are you contriving a monopoly?”

Miss Carmagee lifted her mild spectacles to her brother’s face.

“Mrs. Pentherby is dead,” she said.

“Dead!”

“Yes.”

“No extreme loss to the community. Ah—would you—!” and he cast a threatening glance in the direction of the bird-cage at the sound of an insinuating “tweet.” “Well, what about the money?”

The lawyer’s eyes twinkled as though Mrs. Pentherby’s dividends were more interesting than her person.

“She has left nearly all her money and her furniture to Catherine. She died the very same day as Gwen.”

“Pity it wasn’t six months ago. The old lady had some first-class china, and a few fine pictures. Does Catherine say how much?”

“How much what, Porteus?”

“Money, my dear, money.”

“I don’t think she says.”

Her brother pushed back his chair, and glanced briskly at his watch.

“I’ll take it with me,” he said, stretching out a brown and energetic hand for the letter.

“I haven’t quite finished it, Porteus.”

“Never mind; there’s your breakfast getting cold. You had better have some fresh tea made.”

His sister surrendered the letter with a spirit of amiable self-negation.

“The money ought to make a difference to them,” she said, softly, taking off her spectacles and wiping them with slow, pensive hands.

“Money always makes a difference, my dear, especially when people are heroically proud.”

Miss Phyllis Carmagee’s thoughts were towards that gray-skied, slaving, sordid town where Gwen was buried, as she sipped her tea and looked at her brother’s empty chair. She was a woman whom many of her neighbors thought stolid and reserved, a woman not gifted with great powers of self-expression. Friendship with many is a mere gratification of the social ego. The vivacious people who delight in conversationalism, take pleasure in tho............