gone, it makes the pain far, far less. Also, it is a great blessing to
have about one those who know enough not to know too much.

So it was of the three houses, and of those who lived therein.




[Illustration]

CHAPTER TWO.

OF CERTAIN OTHER PEOPLE.


In the littleness of things, it so happened that at a time when John
Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake, serious, solemn, side-by-
side, were telling the widow of Jimmy Blair that the Tidewater Southern
Railroad, in which her husband had largely interested himself before his
death, had declared an extra dividend that had enabled them that day to
deposit to her credit in the bank the sum of four thousand two hundred
and eighty-one dollars and seventy-three cents, in a little hut on the
black Breton coast a woman lay dying.

It was a bare hut, and noisome. In it it were perhaps better to die than
to live; and yet that one might not say. From before it one might gaze
upon league upon league of sullen sea, stretching to where, far in the
dim distance, lay the curve of the horizon upbearing the gray dome of the
sky.