prestige. Newcomers in the Town, superintendents and clerks from the idle Mills, learned for the first time the history of Shane's Castle, all but the scandalous stories about John Shane which were omitted as unsuitable material for an obituary. Besides no one really knew whether they were true or not.
And despite all this vulgar fanfare, it was clear that a great lady had passed, one who in her day had been a sovereign, but one whose day had passed with the coming of the Mills and the vulgar, noisy aristocracy of progress and prosperity.
The obituaries ended with the sentence, "Mrs. Shane is survived by two unmarried daughters, Irene, who resides at Cypress Hill, and Lily who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing."
It was this last sentence which interested the older residents. Lily, who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing. How much lay hidden and mysterious in those two lines. Until the publishing of the obituary, the Town had known nothing of Lily's return.
At five o'clock on the afternoon of the funeral Willie Harrison sat in his mother's bedroom in the sandstone house giving her a detailed account of the funeral. Outside the snow fell in drifting clouds, driven before a wind which howled wildly among the ornamental cupolas and projections of the ugly house. Inside the air hung warm and stifling, touched by the pallid odor of the sickroom. It was a large square room constructed with a great effect of solidity, and furnished with heavy, expensive furniture upholstered in dark red plush. The walls were tan and the woodwork of birch stained a deep mahogany color. Above the ornate mantelpiece hung an engraved portrait of the founder of the Mills and of the Harrison fortune . . . Julis Harrison, coarse, powerful, beetle-browed, his heavy countenance half-buried beneath a thick chin beard. The engraving was surrounded by a wide frame of bright German gilt; it looked down upon the room with the gaze of one who has wrought a great success out of nothing by the sweat of his brow and labor of bulging muscles, as once he had hammered crude metal into links and links into chains in the
