“You are going with me to the cemetery,” she said kindly, “and then I’ll turn you over to Mr. Donald, who’ll bring you home and read the will to you in the library. . . . Abominable!” She had heard the click of a camera. “But your features will hardly be distinguishable through that veil. I only hope the paper is one that decent people take in.” She looked askance at the necklace but concluded to ignore it. Tact never failed her. CHAPTER VI The casket had been placed on its shelf in the Carteret vault and wreaths and crosses piled to the roof. Mr. Donald conducted Gita to his motor and they returned in silence to the manor. Gita drew a long breath. Her grandmother had made her final exit. She might regret, but she had mourned too deeply for her mother to confuse regret with grief. And she was conscious of a thrill of expectation. She had seen plays where wills were read by a solemn lawyer to a solemn family and thought them highly dramatic. Now she was to be the central figure in such a scene and that old library would be a proper setting. Topper was standing in the hall. She gave him her first order. “Please send all these flowers that are left to some hospital—at once. And open every window in the house.” Topper, who distrusted fresh air even by day, shook his head in protest, but his eyes fell before the dark imperious gaze that had mastered his will for seventy-odd years. He had never expected to have a young mistress in his old age, and he and Andrew retired to the pantry and wept into two generous glasses of old port. Gita followed Mr. Donald into the library and opened its windows herself. It was a very large room with books to the ceiling, galleries, alcoves, flights of steps. Over the paneled oak mantel was a half-length portrait of her grandfather, at which she had scowled more than once; it bore a fatal resemblance to her father. The room, when closed, had that subtle odor of death that comes from rotting calf, and, possibly, from those silent emanations of brains long still. But when the sunlight poured in and the salt winds from the Atlantic purified the air, it looked less like a tomb of dead thought, merely a dignified old library in a stately old manor house. Gita took a chair close to one of the windows and Mr. Donald settled himself with a sigh of relief in a large leather chair by the central table. “This has been a trying day,” he said, “and I am not as young as I was. I shall miss my old friend, who was a remarkable woman, Miss Carteret, a remarkable woman.” “Yes,” said Gita sincerely, “she was. I wish I could have known her longer—and that she could have been sixty instead of eighty.”