There is no drama greater than the drama of life. The actors are more than often thrust into rôles that are not of their choosing, and they respond to cues that they do not recognize as cues, blindly obeying the director as he plunges them into unsought situations. Mrs. Bogart, the Gilmore cook, who came to Greenacres each morning and returned to her home on the outskirts of Ardmore each evening, was in the kitchen; and, although it was baking day, not so much as a cup of flour had been sifted. She had arrived shortly after daybreak, to be greeted with news of the murder, and immediately she gave herself over to intermittent outbursts of weeping. Not that Mrs. Bogart, wide of hips, ample of bosom and stolid of countenance, with straight, black hair brushed severely back from her low and usually damp forehead, had any great feeling of bereavement; but, for all of her phlegmatic aspect, the cook was given to strong emotions. At the funeral of a comparative stranger, for instance, it was the sound of her sobs which arose above the muffled grief of the immediate family. So Mrs. Bogart, except for brewing a bit of breakfast tea and toasting some slices of bread--badly burned, at that--neglected her kitchen work and gave way to her emotional nature. From Bates she had learned that the undertaker had arrived, and that "the new Mrs. Gilmore" had been, as she phrased it, "laid out" in one of the spare bedrooms on the second floor. Now, Mrs. Bogart, her attendance at funerals amounting to an obsession, had gazed into the face of death innumerable times, but she had never known the thrill of looking into the features of one who had been murdered. People about Ardmore were in the habit of dying prosaically in their beds. This was an opportunity that might never come to her again; and well-to-do folks, she had observed, frequently had their funerals conducted privately, turning back the pryingly curious. For some time Mrs. Bogart, whose place was strictly the kitchen, and who had no other household duties, had been trying to think up an excuse to visit the second floor, considering that this might offer her an opportunity of viewing the dead woman. Not possessing a particularly agile mind, it took her some little time to arrive at this bit of pretense, and she wouldn't have thought of it then except for some empty fruit jars. And, while the jars might have better gone to the basement, Mrs. Bogart craftily decided to carry them upstairs to the third floor and into the seldom-used storeroom. "Goodness knows," she murmured, "I've been threatenin' for days upon days to get 'em out of the kitchen."