“Ha!  D’ye get that?” said Mrs. Apostleman.  “Go on!”

“’Frothingham left his own daughter something considerably less than a hundred thousand dollars,’” Barry presently resumed, “’not more than seventy or eighty thousand, certainly.  It is still invested in the estate.  It must pay her three or four thousand a year.  And besides that she has only Burgoyne’s insurance, twenty or twenty-five thousand, for those years of illness pretty well used up his own money.  I believe the stepsisters were very anxious to make her a more generous arrangement, but she seems to have declined it.  Alice says they are quite devoted—­’”

“Alice don’t count!” said the old lady “that’s his wife.  That’s enough.”  She stopped the reader and refolded the letter, her mischievous eyes dancing.  “Well, what d’ye think of that?” she demanded.

Barry’s bewildered, “Well, I will be darned!” set loose a babel of tongues.  Mrs. Apostleman had not counted in vain upon a sensation; everyone talked at once.  Mrs. White’s high, merry laugh dominated all the other voices.

“So there is a very much better reason for this simple-dinner-blue-gingham existence than we supposed,” said the President of the Santa Paloma Women’s Club amusedly when the first rush of comment died away.  “I think that is quite delicious!  While all of us were feeling how superior she was not to get a motor, and not to rebuild the Hall, she was simply living within her income, and making the best of it!”

“I don’t know that it makes her any less superior,” Mrs. Carew said thoughtfully.  “It—­it certainly makes her seem—­nicer.  I never suspected her of—­well, of preaching, exactly, but I have sometimes thought that she really couldn’t enter into our point of view, with all that money!  I think I’m going to like her more than ever!” she finished laughingly.

“Why, it’s the greatest relief in the world!” exclaimed Mrs. Adams.  “I’ve been rather holding back about going up there, and imitating her, because I honestly didn’t want to be influenced by eight millions, and I was afraid.  I was.  Not a week ago Wayne asked me if I thought she’d like him to donate a sewing machine to her Girls’ Club for them to run up their little costumes with—­he has the agency, you know—­and I said, ’Oh, don’t, Wayne, she can buy them a sewing machine apiece if she wants to, and never know it!’ But I’m going to make him write her, to-night,” said Mrs. Adams, firmly, “and I declare I feel as if a weight had dropped off my shoulders.  It means so much more now, if we offer her the club.  It means that we aren’t merely giving a Lady Bountiful her way, but that we’re all working together like neighbors, and trying to do some good in the world.”

“And I don’t think there’s any question that she would live exactly this way,” Miss Pratt contributed shyly, “and play with the children, and dress as she does, even if she had fifty millions!  She’s simply found out what pays in this life, and what doesn’t pay, and I think a good many of us were living too hard and fast ever to stop and think whether it was really worth while or not.  She’s the happiest woman I ever knew; it makes one happy just to be with her, and no money can buy that.”