bout the immediate future and the vast changes
which the death of this great man would necessarily bring. In the
political clubs, his passing was discussed with bated breath.

At the hospitals and charitable institutions which he had so
generously helped to maintain, in the art clubs and museums, in the
Cosmopolitan Opera House--in the founding of which he had been leading
spirit and unfailingly thereafter, its most generous contributor--he
was mourned with a sincerity no less deep because of its admixture of
self-interest.

In aristocratic drawing-rooms, there were whispers over the tea-cups;
the luck of Ramon Hamilton, the rising young lawyer, whose engagement
to Anita Lawton, daughter and sole heiress of the dead financier, had
just been announced, was remarked upon with the frankness of envy,
left momentarily unguarded by the sudden shock.

For three days Pennington Lawton lay in simple, but veritable state.
Telegrams poured in from the highest representatives of State, clergy
and finance. Then, while the banks and charitable institutions
momentarily closed their doors, and flags throughout the city were
lowered in respect to the man who had gone, the funeral procession
wound its solemn way from the aristocratic church of St. James, to the
graveyard. The last extras were issued, detailing the service; the
last obituaries printed, the final paeans of praise were sung, and the
world went on its way.

During the two days thereafter, multitudinous affairs of more
imperative public import were brought to light; a celebrated murder
was committed; a notorious band of criminals was rounded up; a
political boss toppled and fell from his self-made pedestal; a
diplomatic scandal of far-reaching effect was unearthed, and in the
press of passing events, the fact that Lawton had been eliminated from
the scheme of things faded into comparative insignificance, from the
point of view of the general public.

In the great house on Belleair Avenue, which the man who was gone had
called home, a tall, slender young girl sat listlessly conversing with
a pompous little man, whose clerical garb proclaimed the reason for
his coming. The girl's sable garments pathetically betrayed her youth,
and in her soft eyes was the pained and wounded look of a child face
to face with its first comprehended sorrow.

The Rev. Dr. Franklin laid an obsequious hand upon her arm.

"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of
the