“And the most powerful of all the arts that arouse the emotions.  Hang it! when I hear a great singer, a great violinist, half the time I find an invisible hand clutching me by the throat ...  Patty, honestly now, didn’t you write that letter?”

“Yes,” looking him courageously in the eyes.  “And I hope you were not laughing when you said all those kind things about it.”

“Laughing?  No,” gravely, “I was not laughing.  Play something lively; Chaminade; I am blue to-night.”

So Patty played the light, enchanting sketches.  In the midst of one of them she stopped suddenly.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I thought I heard the boat’s whistle.  Listen.  Yes, there it is.  It must be a telegram.  They never come up to the head of the lake at night for anything less.  There goes John with a lantern.”

“Never mind the telegram,” he said; “play.”

A quarter of an hour later John and Kate came in.

“A telegram for you, Dick,” John announced, sending the yellow envelope skimming through the air.

Warrington caught it deftly.  He balanced it in his hand speculatively.

“It is probably a hurry-call from the senator.  I may have to go back to town to-morrow.  I have always hated telegrams.”

He opened it carelessly and read it.  He read it again, slowly; and Patty, who was nearest to him, saw his face turn gray under the tan and his lips tremble.  He looked from one to the other dumbly, then back at the sheet in his hand.

“Richard!” said Kate, with that quick intuition which leaps across chasms of doubt and arrives definitely.

“My aunt died this afternoon,” he said, his voice breaking, for he had not the power to control it.

Nobody moved; a kind of paralysis touched them all.

“She died this afternoon, and I wasn’t there.”  There is something terribly pathetic in a strong man’s grief.

“Dick!” John rushed to his side.  “Dick, old man, there must be some mistake.”

He seized the telegram from Warrington’s nerveless fingers.  There was no mistake.  The telegram was signed by the family physician.  Then John did the kindliest thing in his power.

“Do you wish to be alone, Dick?”

Warrington nodded.  John laid the telegram on the table, and the three of them passed out of the room.  A gust of wind, coming down from the mountains, carried the telegram gently to the floor.  Warrington, leaning against the table, stared down at it.

What frightful things these missives are!  Charged with success or failure, riches or poverty, victory or defeat, births or deaths, they fly to and fro around the great world hourly, on ominous and sinister wings.  A letter often fails to reach us, but a telegram, never.  It is the messenger of fate, whose emissaries never fail to arrive.