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Rh "I meant my own personal mail, Aunt Effie. I assure you, it's quite enough for me to take on my shoulders."

Gene opened his lips as if to retort, but evidently thought better of it and with a shrug devoted himself to his fish. The dinner progressed in silence to its close; but when Peters at a nod from Richard Lorne had placed the coffee upon the table and departed little Miss Effie glanced about and said timidly:

"We—we mustn't go on like this, you know. The—the loss of our dear ones—". She put her handkerchief for a moment to her brimming eyes. "To have my poor sister and her dear son taken from us so suddenly and with so short a space of time between is heartrending, but it is the Lord's will and we must not complain. If we go on as we have been, we shall have Peters talking to the other servants about us. We are acting as if—as if—"

"As if we were afraid!" Randall, the cripple, thrust himself forward suddenly in his chair. "Must we be hypocrites eternally? We grieve, of course, each in our own way, and that concerns only our own souls if we have any, but there is something else back in the minds of all of us and that is fear! Even you, even Dad! Why, look around the table! Aren't we each asking ourselves: 'Will I be the next? Will I be the next?' Do we believe it was the Lord's will?"

"This is madness!" Richard Lorne put down his coffee-cup, which he had held suspended in a shaking hand while he listened as if hypnotized to his step-son's harangue. "Let us hear no more of this, this wild raving! I believe you are losing your mind! You know that the deaths of both your mother and brother were due to perfectly natural