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