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 fighting. She might have but a few years longer to live and she must hurry and settle this matter. There must be an heir to whom she might pass on the fortune. . . not a sickly girl like little Thérèse but a man who could manage a responsibility so enormous.

Though her body was weary, her mind was alert. There still remained a chance. In the gathering darkness, she knew that the chance depended upon two things. . . the hope that Ellen Tolliver still loved Richard as she had so clearly loved him on the night years earlier when the girl had talked to her in this very room; and the hope that Lilli Barr was as honest, as respectable, as bourgeois as Ellen Tolliver had been.

She got up and in the darkness made her way to the bell. When the butler appeared and switched on the lights, she said, "Please get me a box for the concert of Lilli Barr. . . . It's a week from to-morrow." And, as he was leaving, she added, "I shall give a dinner that night. See to it that the rest of the house is got ready."

This was the first step. 

N the very same night in her weathered house sheltered by lilacs and syringas in the Town Miss Ogilvie, trembling and fluttering like a canary set free and preening itself in the sun, packed her trunk for the trip to the East. Any one looking on might have believed her, save for the wrinkled rosy cheeks and the slight spare figure, a young girl on the eve of her first party. After all, it was an event. . . the first trip she had made to the East since the Seventies when she had sailed as a girl for Munich. And she was going East to hear Ellen Tolliver play. . . Ellen who had been a chit of a girl when she had last seen her, Ellen who was now Lilli Barr, whose name and picture appeared everywhere in the papers, Ellen who had hid-