would telephone for me--I'm sick of this place! Or I wish
Wolf would come walking around that corner--oh, if he would--if he
would----!" Norma said, staring out with an intensity so great that it
seemed to her for the moment that Wolf indeed might come. "If only he'd
come to take me to dinner, at some little Italian place with a backyard,
and skyscrapers all about, so that we could talk!"

Regina, coming in a little later, saw that Mrs. Sheridan had been
crying, and reproached her with the affectionate familiarity of an old
servitor.

"You that were always so light-hearted, Miss, it don't seem right for
you to grieve so!" said Regina, a little tearful herself. Norma smiled,
and wiped her eyes.

"This is a nice beginning," the girl told herself, as she bathed and
dressed for the evening ordeal of calls, and messages, and solemn visits
to the chamber of death, "this is a nice beginning for a woman who knows
that the man she loves is free to marry her, and who has just fallen
heir to a great fortune!"

CHAPTER XXXIII

The evening moved through its dark and sombre hours unchanged; Joseph's
assistants opened and opened and opened the door. More flowers--more
flowers--and more. Notes, telephone messages, black-clad callers
murmuring in the dimness of the lower hall, maids coming noiselessly and
deferentially, the clergyman, the doctor, the choir-master, old Judge
Lee tremulous and tedious, all her world circled about the lifeless form
of the old mistress of the house. Certain persons went quietly upstairs,
women in rich furs, and bare-headed, uncomfortable-looking men, entered
the front room, and passed through with serious faces and slowly shaking
heads.

Chris spoke to Norma in the hall, just after she had said good-night to
some rather important callers, assuring them that Annie and Leslie were
well, and had been kissed herself as their representative. He extended
her a crushed document in which she was alarmed to recognize Wolf's
letter.

"Oh--I think I dropped that in Aunt Annie's dressing-room!" Norma said,
turning scarlet, and wondering what eyes had seen it.

"There was no envelope; a maid brought it to her, and Annie read it,"
Chris said. Norma's eyes were racing through it.

"There are no names!" she said, thankfully.

"It would have been a most unfortunate--a--a horrible thing, if there
had been," Chris commented. Something in his manner said as plainly as
words that dropping the letter had bee