All morning he sat in the library, with frowning brows, thinking. At noon he took the train for the city and, soon after its arrival, despatched to Mariposa the five hundred dollars. He had no doubt of her accepting it, as it never crossed his mind that Lucy, at the last moment, might have told. * * * * * The days that followed her mother’s funeral passed to Mariposa like a series of gray dreams, dreadful, with an unfamiliar sense of wretchedness. The preoccupation of her mother’s illness was gone. There were idle hours, when she sat in her rooms and tried to realize the full meaning of Lucy’s last words. She would sit motionless, staring before her, her heart feeling shriveled in her breast. Her life seemed broken to pieces. She shrank from the future, with the impossibilities she had pledged herself to. And the strength and inspiration of the beautiful past were gone. All the memories of that happy childhood and young maidenhood were blasted. It was natural that the shock and the subsequent brooding should make her view of the subject morbid. The father that she had grown up to regard with reverential tenderness, had not been hers. The mother, who had been a cherished idol, had hidden a dark secret. And she, herself, was an outsider from the home she had so deeply loved--child of a brutal and tyrannical father--originally adopted and cared for out of pity. It was a crucial period in her life. Old ideals were gone, and new ones not yet formed. There seemed only ruins about her, and amid these she sought for something to cling to, and believe in. With secret passion she nursed the thought of Essex--all she had left that had not been swept away in the deluge of this past week. Fortunately for her, the business calls of the life of a woman left penniless shook her from her state of brooding idleness. The cottage was hers for a month longer, and despite the impoverished condition of the widow, there was a fair amount of furniture still left in it that was sufficiently valuable to be a bait to the larger dealers. Mariposa found her days varied by contentions with men, who came to stare at the great red lacquer cabinet and investigate the interior condition of the marquetry sideboard. When the month was up she was to move to a small boarding-house, kept by Spaniards called Garcia, that Mrs. Willers, in her varying course, included among her habitats. The Garcias would not object to her piano and practising, and it was amazingly cheap. Mrs. Willers herself had lived there in one of her periods of eclipse, and knew them to be respectable denizens of a somewhat battered Bohemia. “But you’re going to be a Bohemian yourself, being a musical genius,” she said cheerfully. “So you won’t mind that.” Mariposa did not think she would mind. In the chaotic dimness of the dismantled front parlor she looked like a listless goddess who would not mind anything.