Willem stood aghast for a second, while the curt announcement sank into his senses. Then in a burst of angry, rebellious wonder, the child cried:
"Dead? He can't be. He can't! Why, I've got our circus tickets!"
CHAPTER VIII
AFTERWARD
Grimm Manor was in mourning. And, far more to the dead man's honour, Grimm Manor was mourning.
The last of the ancient line was dead. The Grimms had been the ruling spirits in the drowsy little up-State town for more than two centuries. From father to son, the hierarchy had been handed down.
In days when the district was a wilderness and when the Grimms fought wild animal and Indian, and in the days when it was a prosperous suburb and the Grimms fought "scale" and locust, it had been the same:—ever a Grimm had swayed the little community.
Quiet in spite of his eccentric ways and dress, Peter Grimm had been known chiefly as a kindly neighbour and a shrewd business man. But now, after his death, all sorts and conditions of people came forward with queer stories of his private dealings.
There was a crotchety old Civil War veteran, for instance, who lived "on the Mountain" and who was a reputed miser. He now told how Peter Grimm had eked out his $8 a month pension for the past forty years and had made it possible for him to live in comfort. A crippled woman who, with her four children, had at one time seemed likely to become a public charge and who had been relieved in the nick of time by a legacy, now told the real source of that providential "legacy."