“Shall I read you from Mark?” Alix asked, as his voice sank again.  A shabby old Bible always stood at her father’s bedside; she reached for it, and making a desperate effort to steady her voice, began to read.  The place was marked by an old letter, and opened at the chapter he seemed to desire, for as she read he seemed to be drinking in the words.  Once they heard him whisper “Wonderful!” Cherry got up on the bed, and took the splendid dying head in her arms, the murky winter dawn crept in, and the lamp burned sickly in the daylight.  Hong could be heard stirring.  Alix closed the book and extinguished the lamp.  Cherry did not move.

“Charity!” the old man said, presently, in a simple, childish tone.  Later, with bursts of tears, in all the utter desolation of the days that followed, Cherry loved to remember that his last utterance was her name.  But Alix knew, though she never said it, that it was to another Charity he spoke.

Subdued, looking younger and thinner in their new black, the sisters came downstairs, ten days later, for a business talk.  Peter had been named as one executor, but Peter was far away, and it was a pleasant family friend, a kindly old surgeon of Doctor Strickland’s own age, or near it, and the lawyer, George Sewall, the other executor, who told them about their affairs.  Anne, as co-heiress, was present at this talk, with Justin sitting close beside her.  Martin, too, who had come down for the funeral, was there.

Cherry was white, headachy, indifferent; she seemed stunned by her loss; but Alix’s extraordinary vitality had already asserted itself, and she set herself earnestly to understand their somewhat complicated affairs.

The house went to the daughters; there were books and portraits for Anne, a box or two in storage for Anne, and Anne was mentioned in the only will as equally inheriting with Alexandra and Charity.  For some legal reason that the lawyer and Doctor Younger made clear, Anne could not fully inherit, but her share would be only a trifle less than her cousins’.

Things had reached this point when Justin Little calmly and confidently claimed that Anne’s share was to be based upon an old loan of Anne’s father to his brother, a loan of three thousand dollars to float Lee Strickland’s invention, with the understanding that Vincent Strickland be subsequently entitled to one third of the returns.  As the patent had been sold for nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, one third of it, with accumulative interest for ten years, of which no payment had ever been made Anne, was a large proportion of the entire estate, and the development of this claim, in Justin Little’s assured, woodeny voice, caused everyone except the indifferent Cherry to look grave.

The estate was not worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars now, by any means; it had been reduced to little more than two thirds of that sum, and Anne’s bright concern that everyone should be satisfied with what was right, and her ingenuous pleasure in Justin’s cleverness in thinking of this possibility, were met with noticeable coldness.