She did it well.  One hand rested by the finger-tips upon the open volume before her; her glistening robes fell back as she gained her full height,—­she swayed forward toward the assembly that leaned itself toward her; the left hand threw itself back with a noble gesture of generous declaring; the fingers curving from the open palm as it might have been toward the pallet of the dead soldier at her side.  She was utterly motionless for an instant; then, as the applause broke down the silence, she turned, and grandly passed out along the stage, and disappeared.

Within the door of the anteroom stood a messenger from the hotel.  He had a telegraph envelope in his hand; he put it into hers.

She tore it open,—­not thinking, scarcely noticing; the excitement of the instant just past moved her nerves,—­no apprehension of what this might be.

Then the lightning reached her:  struck her through and through.

“Your ma’s dying:  come back:  no money.”

Those last words were a mistake; the whole dispatch, in its absurd homeliness and its pitiless directness, was the work of old Mrs. Knoxwell, the blacksmith’s wife, used to hammers and nails, and believing in good, forceful, honest ways of doing things; feeling also a righteous and neighborly indignation against this child, negligent of her worn and lonely mother; “skitin’ about the country, makin’ believe big and famous.  She would let her know the truth, right out plain; it would be good for her.”

What she had meant to write at the end was “Pneumonia;” but spelling it “Numoney,” it had got transmitted as we have seen.

It struck Marion through and through; but she did not feel it at first.  It met the tide of her triumph and elation full in her throbbing veins; and the two keen currents turned to a mere stillness for a moment.

Then she dropped down where she was, all into the golden mass and shine of her bright raiment, with her hands before her eyes, the paper crumpled in the clinch of one of them.

The President of the People’s Lyceum Club made a little speech, and dismissed the audience.  “Miss Kent had received by telegraph most painful intelligence from her family; was utterly unable to appear again.”

The audience behaved as an American People’s Club knows so well how to behave; dispersed quietly, without a grumble, or a recollection of the half value of the tickets lost.  Miss Kent’s carriage drove rapidly from a side door.  In two hours, she was on board the night train down from Vermont.

That was on Friday night.

On Sunday morning Frank Sunderline came in on the service train, and went up to Pilgrim Street.

“Mrs. Kent is dead,” he told Kay.  “Marion is in awful trouble.  Can’t you come out to her?”

Ray was just leaving the house to go to church.  Instead, she went with Frank to the horse-railroad station, catching the eleven o’clock car.  She had been expecting him in the afternoon, to take her to drink tea with his mother, who was not able to come in to see her.