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284 stroke first, and he fell forward with his face in his soup-plate and got his nose and mouth quite covered with the soup. He was drowned. All on dry land and in his bedroom. Too terrible. What dangers we are all in!”

She gave a loud squeak and escaped, to tell her husband.

Diva had finished calling on everybody, and approached rapidly.

“He must have died of a stroke,” said Diva. “Very much depressed lately. That precedes a stroke.”

“Oh, then, haven’t you heard, dear?” said Miss Mapp. “It is all too terrible! On Christmas Day, too!”

“Suicide?” asked Diva. “Oh, how shocking!”

“No, dear. It was like this....”

Miss Mapp got back to her house long before she usually left it. Her cook came up with the proposed bill of fare for the day.

“That will do for lunch,” said Miss Mapp. “But not soup in the evening. A little fish from what was left over yesterday, and some toasted cheese. That will be plenty. Just a tray.”

Miss Mapp went to the garden-room and sat at her window.

“All so sudden,” she said to herself.

She sighed.

“I daresay there may have been much that was good in Captain Puffin,” she thought, “that we knew nothing about.”

She wore a wintry smile.

“Major Benjy will feel very lonely,” she said.