Page:Frank Owen - Woman Without Love (1949 reprint).djvu/114

 Madame Leota sighed. For the first time, she had regrets. Perhaps her life had been naught but wastage. In retrospection the glamour died from it. She saw it as it had been, tawdry, cheap. She drew her hand wearily across her eyes. She was getting old. She was growing tired.

Presently Terese entered the room with a pile of letters.

"Much mail has accumulated while you were away," she said.

"I suppose we'd better glance through it," said Madame.

Terese sat down at the table and commenced slitting open the envelopes. Besides being a maid, she acted in the capacity of confidential secretary.

Listlessly Madame picked up the first letter. She considered correspondence a waste of time and a dreadful nuisance. It was from a Jewish Orphan Asylum. They wanted a donation.

"Better send them a few dollars," she chuckled, "and write them a note expressing our regret that we can't send them a few orphans. You might explain that up to now we never bothered keeping them. However, henceforth we'll mend our ways."

The next letter was from a dancing school.

"Do you want to learn to dance in three easy lessons?" asked Terese.

"Ask him to come over," Madame said. Before withdrawing the next letter from the envelope, she looked at the name in the upper left-hand corner:

"It looks perilously much as though we've been pinched," she said to Terese. Then she read the letter slowly and all sign of levity left her face. So great was the shock she was speechless. The letter was from her brother's lawyer. Templeton Blaine was dead. He had died as he had lived, in his brokerage office, as he stood reading the ticker-tape. Templeton would have asked no pleasanter way to die. He had died in harness. At that very moment his stocks were going up. He did not suffer for a