60 TROTTY’S WEDDING TOUR. went into sudden mourning as deep as her own bombazine dress. She had taken the sign down in a fit of impatient grief almost like vexation. It seemed to her as if there were a kind of positive personal wickedness in that sign. To hold up its bare face to the world just the same as ever, and per- sist that H. Jasper kept furniture warerooms, when — O poor father! poor father! And there the bold-faced sign was drenched and forgiven in a flood of tears. It was just a week that morning since he died. The funeral was over, the muddy ground was stamped over the last piece of furniture that H. Jasper would ever own, the house was swept, the sick-room aired and dreadfully fresh. Relations in light mourning had gone to their own happy homes, her mother had taken to the mending-basket and untold accumulated stockings, and Poppet had played his first game of marbles — half frightened to death, too, because he laughed in the course of it—— with an Irish boy in the street. Nobody but Jem had come to the store. Nobody, not even Jem, knew what was to become of the store. Nobody, least of all Jem, knew what was to become of herself. “ What becomes of me becomes of us all,’’ she said to her- self, — and she said it, I must own, at the funeral. “ I’m father now.” It did not seem to her that she had had any time to ery, till she locked herself in with that sign; the funeral and the