When she awoke it was daylight and the telephone was ringing in the distance. She heard the maid answer, heard Dick take the call on his extension. He was home then. He must have come in after half past two. The murmur of his voice was indistinct. She lay there feeling as if she had been beaten; physically tired from the strain of the night before. The children were being dressed in the nursery. She wondered what the inefficient woman in the kitchen was doing, but the routine did not stir her to action as it usually did. She heard Dick still telephoning. A sick feeling at the thought of meeting him came over her. Would he come in or would he appear at breakfast,--cold, condemning, unjust? He came in. She braced herself a little, but there was no need. He came swiftly over to her and stood looking down at her, his face troubled, pale. She had not guessed that he would feel like that. “Cecily, I’ve got to tell you something dreadful. Are you going to be game--brave, darling?” He was in love with Fliss; he was going to go away from her. She sat up, her hand against her throat to keep back the scream which she felt might come. Dick sat down beside her and went straight through it. “Last night Walter found me at the Club. He had a garbled telegram and we spent hours trying to get at the facts. When I came in you were asleep and I wanted you to get the sleep so that you could bear this better.” “This--this?” “Darling, your father wired that your mother died of pneumonia at seven o’clock last night.” CHAPTER XX Mrs. Walter Warner, in the most elaborate of mourning clothes, ordered from New York, still held sway in her mother-in-law’s house. It seemed probable that she always would be there now. Since his wife’s death, Mr. Warner had come to “depend” on Walter, and if depending on Walter meant inoculating himself to the elaborate black and white (mostly white) of Walter’s wife’s costumes and enduring Della at his table, apparently he was able to put up with that too. Della was nice to him. She said to her friends that she meant to be “nice to poor old Mr. Warner,” and proceeded to take charge of his house, enlarge his bills and with the immense insolence that was hers also began to take to herself considerable credit for doing so. It was two months since her mother’s death and for the first time Cecily felt able to begin the task of looking over her mother’s personal possessions. Mr. Warner had given few directions, expressed few wishes, but on that point he had been explicit. He had closed and locked his wife’s room and said to Cecily, in giving her the key to the room and to the little safe in it--“I have taken the few things from it that I wish to have remind me of her. I have not opened the safe. The things there and the other things are yours and Dorothea’s. And, of course, Cecily, you are no less my daughter. You and the boys are to share equally in my estate, which was also your mother’s.”