I hurried down-stairs to find Davidson gone. My blanket lay neatly folded, on the lower step, and the horsehair chairs were ranged along the wall as before. I looked around anxiously for telltale ashes, but there was none, save, at the edge of the spotless register, a trace. Evidently they had followed the apple parings. It grew cold a day or so later, and Miss Letitia had the furnace fired, and although it does not belong to my story, she and Heppie searched the house over to account for the odor of baking apples--a mystery that was never explained. Wardrop did not appear at breakfast. Margery came down-stairs as Bella was bringing me my coffee, and dropped languidly into her chair. She looked tired and white. "Another day!" she said wearily. "Did you ever live through such an eternity as the last thirty-six hours?" I responded absently; the duty I had assumed hung heavy over me. I had a frantic impulse to shirk the whole thing: to go to Wardrop and tell him it was his responsibility, not mine, to make this sad-eyed girl sadder still. That as I had not his privilege of comforting her, neither should I shoulder his responsibility of telling her. But the issue was forced on me sooner than I had expected, for at that moment I saw the glaring head-lines of the morning paper, laid open at Wardrop's plate. She must have followed my eyes, for we reached for it simultaneously. She was nearer than I, and her quick eye caught the name. Then I put my hand over the heading and she flushed with indignation. "You are not to read it now," I said, meeting her astonished gaze as best I could. "Please let me have it. I promise you I will give it to you--almost immediately." "You are very rude," she said without relinquishing the paper. "I saw a part of that; it is about my father!" "Drink your coffee, please," I pleaded. "I will let you read it then. On my honor." She looked at me; then she withdrew her hand and sat erect. "How can you be so childish!" she exclaimed. "If there is anything in that paper that it--will hurt me to learn, is a cup of coffee going to make it any easier?" I gave up then. I had always thought that people heard bad news better when they had been fortified with something to eat, and I had a very distinct recollection that Fred had made Edith drink something--tea probably--before he told her that Billy had fallen off the back fence and would have to have a stitch taken in his lip. Perhaps I should have offered Margery tea instead of coffee. But as it was, she sat, stonily erect, staring at the paper, and feeling that evasion would be useless, I told her what had happened, breaking the news as gently as I could. I stood by her helplessly through the tearless agony that followed, and cursed myself for a blundering ass. I had said that he had been accidentally shot, and I said it with the paper behind me, but she put the evasion aside bitterly.