Mrs. Willers found Mariposa strangely apathetic. She had tried to cheer her and then had seen, to her amazement, that the girl showed little disappointment. That the sudden blow had upset her was obvious. She undoubtedly looked ill. But the wrenching from her hand of liberty, independence, possibilities of fame, seemed to affect her little. She listened in silence to Mrs. Willers’ account of the Bonanza King’s death. As an “inside writer” on _The Trumpet_ the newspaper woman had heard every detail of the tragic event discussed threadbare in the perturbed office. Shackleton had been found, as the paper stated, sitting at his desk in the library at Menlo Park. He had been writing letters when death called him. His wife had come in late at night and found him thus, leaning on the desk as if tired. It was an aneurism, the doctors said. The heart had been diseased for years. No one, however, had had any idea of it. Poor Mrs. Shackleton was completely prostrated. It was not newspaper talk that she was in a state of collapse. “And it was enough to collapse any woman,” said Mrs. Willers, with a sympathetic wag of the head, “to come in and find your husband sitting up at his desk stone dead. And a good husband, too. It would have given me a shock to have found Willers that way, and even an obituary notice in the paper of which he was proprietor could hardly have called Willers a good husband.” Two days’ rest restored Mariposa to some sort of balance. She still felt weak and stunned in heart and brain. The lack of interest she had shown to Mrs. Willers had been the outward sign of this internal benumbed condition. But as she slowly dressed on the morning of the third day, she felt a slight ripple of returning life, a thawing of these congealed faculties. She heard the quick, decisive step of Barron in the hallway outside, and then its stoppage at her door, and his call through the crack, “How are you this morning? Better?” “Much,” she answered; “I’m getting up.” “First-rate. Couldn’t do better. Get a move on and go out. It’s a day that would put life into a mummy. I’d take you out myself, but I’ve got to go down town and lasso one of my victims.” Then he clattered down the stairs. Mariposa had not seen him since their supper together. Every morning he had stopped and called a greeting of some sort through the door. She shrank from meeting him again. The extraordinary remark she had made to him haunted her. The only thing that appeased her was the memory of his face, in which there was no consciousness of the meaning of her words, only consternation and amaze at the effect his news had produced.