"Yes, he is."

"This young man's also, I presume."

"Yes, he is," declared Day. But the man only heeded Allbright's response that he was.

"Well," said the man, "may I ask a question?"

"Yes, you may," said Day, pertly, "but it don't follow that we are goin' to answer it."

"May I ask," said the man, addressing Allbright, "if Captain Carroll has paid you your salaries?"

"He has paid me every dollar he owed me," replied Allbright, with emphasis, and his own face flushed.

Then the man turned to Day. "Has he paid you?" he inquired.

And Day, with no hesitation, lied. "Yes, sir, he has, every darned cent," he declared, "and I don't know what business it is of yours whether he has or not."

"When is he coming back?" asked the man, of Allbright, not heeding Day.

"Next Monday," replied Allbright, with confidence.

"Where does he live?" asked the man.

Then for the first time an expression of confusion came over the book-keeper's face, but Day arose to the occasion.

"He lives in Orange," replied Day.

"What street, and number?"

"One hundred and sixty-three Water Street," replied Day. His eyes flashed. He was finding an unwholesome exhilaration in this inspirational lying.

"Well," said the man, "I can tell you one thing, if your precious boss ain't in this office Monday morning by nine o'clock sharp, he'll see me at one hundred an sixty-three Water Street, Orange, New Jersey, and he'll hand over my two thousand odd dollars that he's swindled me out of, or I'll have the law on him." With that the man swung himself aboard a passing car, and Allbright and Day were left looking after him.

"That feller had ought to have been knocked down," said Day.

Allbright turned and looked at him gravely. "So, Captain Carroll lives in Orange?" he said.

"He may, for all I know."

"Then you don't know?"

"Do you?"

"No; I never have known exactly."

"Well, I haven't, but I wasn't goin' to let on to that chap. And he may live jest where I said he did, for all I know. Say!"

"What?"

"You s'pose it is all right?"

Allbright hesitated. His eyes fell on three gold balls suspended in the air over a door a little way down a cross street. "Yes," he said. "I believe that Captain Arthur Carroll will pay every man he owes every dollar he owes."

"Well, I guess it's all right," said Day. "I'm goin' to take the girls to Madison Square Garden to-night. I'm pretty short of cash, but you may as well live while you do live. I wonder if the boss is married."

"I don't know."

"I guess he is," said Day, "and I guess he's all right and above board. Good-bye, Allbright. See you Monday."

But Monday, when the two stenographers, the book-keeper, and the clerk met at the office, they found it still locked, and a sign "To let" upon the door.

"Mr. Carroll gave up his office last Saturday," said the man in the elevator. "The janitor said so, and they have taken his safe out for rent. Guess he bust in the Wall Street shindy last week."

Out on the sidewalk the four looked at one another. The pretty stenographer began to cry in a pocket-handkerchief edged with wide, cheap lace.

"I call it a shame," she said, "and here I am owing for board, and—"

"Don't cry, May," said Day, with a caressing gesture towards her in spite of the place. "I guess it will be all right. He has all our addresses, and we shall hear, and you won't have a mite of trouble getting another place."

"I think I am justified in telling you all not to worry in the least, that you will be paid every dollar," said Allbright; but he looked perplexed and troubled.

"It looks mighty black, his not sending us word he was going to close the office," said Day; and then appeared the tall, lean man who wanted his two thousand odd dollars. He did not notice them at all, but started to enter the office-building.

"Come along quick before he comes back," whispered Day. He seized the astonished girls each by an arm and hustled them up the street, and Allbright, after a second's hesitation, followed them just as the irate man emerged from the door.



Chapter XXVII

Arthur Carroll, when he had started on his drive with his wife and sister that afternoon, was in one of those strenuous moods which seem to make one's whole being tick with the clock-work of destiny and cause everything else, all the environment, and the minor happenings of life, to appear utterly idle. Even when he talked, and apparently with earnestness, it was always with that realization of depths, which made his own voice ring empty and strange in his ears. He heard his wife and sister chatter with the sense of aloofness of the inhabitant of another planet; he thought even of the financial difficulties which harassed him, and had caused this very mood, with that same sense of aloofness. When Anna wondered where Charlotte had gone to walk, and Mrs. Carroll remarked on the possibility of their overtaking her, his mind made an actual effort to grasp that simple idea. He was running so deep, and with such awful swiftness, in his own groove of personal tragedy, that the daughter whom he loved, and had seen only a few moments ago, seemed almost left out of sight of his memory. However, all the while the usual trivialities of his life and the lives of those who belonged to him went on with the same regularity and reality as tragedy, and with as certain a trend to a catastrophe of joy or misery.

On that day when Charlotte had her fright from the tramp, she remained at the Anderson's to supper. Eddy had also remained. When Charlotte had waked from her nap, he followed Anderson into the sitting-room, where was Charlotte in Mrs. Anderson's voluminous, white frilly wrapper, a slight young figure scalloped about by soft, white draperies, like a white flower, seated comfortably in the largest, easiest chair in the room. Mrs. Anderson was standing over her with another glass of wine, and a china plate containing two great squares of sponge-cake.

"Do eat this and drink the wine, dear," she urged. "It is nearly an hour before supper now."

"Then I really must go home, if it is so late," Charlotte cried. She made a weak effort to rise. She was still curiously faint when she essayed to move.

"You are going to stay here and have supper, and after supper my son shall take you home. If you are not able to walk, we shall have a carriage."

"I think I must go home, thank you," Charlotte repeated, in a sort of bewildered and grateful dismay.

"If you think your mother will feel anxious, I will send and inform her where you are," said Mrs. Anderson, "but you must stay, my dear." There was about her a soft, but incontrovertible authority. It was all gentleness, like the overlap of feathers, but it was compelling. It was while Mrs. Anderson was insisting and the girl protesting that Anderson, with Eddy at his heels, had entered the room.

"Why, Eddy dear, is that you?" cried Charlotte.

Eddy stood before her and surveyed her with commiseration and a strong sense of personal grievance and reproach. "Yes, it's me," said he. "Papa told me to go to walk with you, and I didn't know which way you went, and I couldn't find out for a long time. Then I saw Mr. Anderson taking you here, and I ran, but I couldn't catch up. He's got awful long legs." Eddy looked accusingly at Anderson's legs.

"It was too bad," said Charlotte.

"You were awful silly to get so scared at nothing," Eddy pursued. "I saw that tramp. He looked to me like a real nice man. Girls are always imagining things. You'd better eat that cake, Charlotte. You look awful. That looks like real nice cake."

"Bless your heart, you shall have some," Mrs. Anderson said, and Eddy accepted with alacrity the golden block of cake which was offered him.

"Why, Eddy!" Charlotte said.

"Now, Charlotte, you know we never have cake like this at home," Eddy said, biting into the cake. "Not since the egg-man won't trust us any more. I know this kind of cake takes lots of eggs. I heard Marie say so when Amy asked her to make it."

Charlotte colored pitifully, and made another effort to rise. "Indeed, I think we must go now," said she. "Come, Eddy."

Mrs. Anderson turned to her son for support. "I tell her she must not think of going until after tea," she said. "Then if she is not able to walk, we will get a carriage."

Eddy removed the fast-diminishing square of cake from his mouth and regarded his sister with an expression of the most open ingenuousness. "Now, Charlotte, I'll tell you something," he said.

"What, dear?"

"You might just as well stay, and I'll tell you why. Papa and Amy and Anna won't be home until after seven."

"Until after seven?"

"No. They are going to Addison."

"To Addison?"

Addison was a large town some fifteen miles from Banbridge.

"Yes; and they are going to get dinner there."

"Eddy, are you sure?"

"Yes, of course I am sure," replied Eddy, with the wide-open eyes of virtue upon his sister's face. "Amy told me to tell you."

"Now, Eddy."

Eddy took another bite of his cake. "I think you are pretty mean to speak that way. I never spoke to you so," he said. "When you say a thing is so, I never say 'Now, Charlotte!'" Eddy, having imitated his sister's doubtful tone exactly, took another bite of cake.

"Well, if Amy really said so," Charlotte returned, and still with a faint accent of incredulity. It was very seldom that the Carrolls took the drive to Addison. However, it was an exceedingly pleasant day, and it did seem possible.

"Well, she did," Eddy declared, stoutly; and there was in his declaration a slight trace of truth, for Mrs. Carroll had mentioned, on starting, that it was such a lovely day, that if they had got an earlier start they might have driven to Addison; and Anna had replied that it was too late now, for they would not get home in time for dinner if they went there. The rest Eddy had manufactured to serve his own small ends—which a stay at the Andersons' to tea, for which he had, remembering his dinner there, the pleasantest anticipations. "You had better stay, Charlotte," Eddy urged, furthermore, "for you do look awful pale, and as if you ought to have something nourishing to eat, and you know we won't get much home. The mutton all went this noon, and you know, unless papa got some in Addison, we wouldn't be likely to get any here. I heard Anna talking about the butcher only this morning. Papa hasn't been able to pay him for a very long time, you know, Charlotte."

Then Charlotte raised herself hastily. "We must go home," she said, with a fierce emphasis; but the effort was too much. She sank back, and Mrs. Anderson sent her son for the camphor-bottle.

"Now," said she to Anderson, "you had better take him out and show him the dog. I'll fix it up." She nodded assuringly towards the little pale face against the rose-patterned chintz.

"Come along, son," said Anderson to the boy, and led him out in the garden. "You must not talk quite so much, young man," he said to him, when they were on their way to the dog-kennel, which was backed up against the terrace at the rear of the house, and before which stood chained fast a large dog with a bad reputation. "You had better not touch him," charged Anderson, as they approached. Then he repeated, "No, you must not talk quite so much."

"Why not?" demanded Eddy. "He don't look very cross."

"Because," said the man, "there are certain things in every family which it is better for a member of the family not to repeat outside his home."

"What did I say?" asked Eddy, wonderingly. "He is wagging his tail. He shakes all over. He wouldn't do that unless his tail was wagging. I can't see his tail, but it must be wagging. What did I say?"

"When it comes to the family's household affairs—" Anderson said.

"Oh, you mean what I said about the butcher, huh? Oh, that don't do any harm. Everybody in Banbridge knows about those things. I don't see what difference that makes. Folks have to have things, don't they? I don't believe that dog would bite me. He is wagging just as hard as he can. Don't they?"

"Yes, of course," agreed Anderson, "but—"

"And if they don't have the money to pay for things, what are they going to do? You wouldn't want all us Carrolls to die, would you?"

Anderson smiled, and stood between the boy and the kennel.

"I ain't afraid of him," said Eddy. "You wouldn't, would you?"

"Oh, of course not," replied Anderson.

"I shouldn't think you would, especially Charlotte. Say, I think Charlotte is a real pretty girl, if she is my sister. Say, why can't I pat him?"

"You had better not. He bit a boy about your size once."

"Hm! I ain't afraid he'll bite me. Don't you think she is? I don't think you are very polite not to say right off."

"Very pretty, indeed," replied Anderson, laughing. Then he spoke to the dog, a large mongrel with a masterly air, and an evident strain of good blood under his white and yellow hide.

"How much did you pay for that dog?" inquired Eddy.

"I didn't pay anything," replied Anderson. "Somebody left him in the street in front of my office when he was a puppy, or he strayed there. I never knew which."

"So you took him in?"

"Yes."

"Do you always keep him shut up here?"

"A great part of the time. Sometimes he stays in my store nights. He is a very good watch-dog."

"You keep him shut up because he bit a boy?"

"Most of the time. He is a little uncertain in his temper, I am afraid."

"Didn't he bite any one but that one boy?"

"No, not that I know of. But he has sprang at a good many people and frightened them, and I have either to keep him tied or shoot him."

"He didn't kill the boy?"

Anderson laughed. "Oh no! He was not very badly bitten."

"Well, I know one thing," said Eddy, with conviction. "I would not like a nice dog like that shut up all his life because he had bitten me."

Before Anderson knew what he was about to do, Eddy had made a spring, leaping up sideways in the air like a kitten, and was close to the dog. And the dog, upon whom there was no reliance to be placed, except in the case of Anderson himself, hardly stopping for a premonitory growl, had seized upon the boy's little arm. Having a strain of pure bulldog in him, it was considerable trouble to make him let go, and Anderson had to use a good deal of force at his collar and a thick stick.

Eddy, meanwhile, made not a whimper, but kept his whitening lips close shut. Luckily he had on a thick jacket, although the day was so warm, and when Anderson drew away at last from the furious, straining animal, and examined the injured member, he found only a slight wound. The marks of the dog's teeth were plainly visible, and there were several breaks of the surface and a little blood, but it was certainly not alarming, and the animal's usual temper made it improbable that any ultra consequences need be feared.

Eddy was trembling and very pale, but he still made not a whimper, as Anderson examined his arm.

"Well, my son," said Anderson, who was as white as the boy, "I think there is not much harm done. But it is lucky you had on such a thick sleeve. I can tell you that."

"That was because we have not paid the Chinaman, and he wouldn't send home my blouses this week. It was so warm I wanted to wear a blouse, but they were all at the Chinaman's." Eddy's teeth chattered as he spoke, his childish lips quivered, and tears were in his eyes. He continued to tremble violently, but he did not for a moment give way. He even shook off the protecting arm which Anderson placed around his little shoulders.

"Come, we will go in the house and have this tied up," said Anderson.

But Eddy rebelled. "I don't want a lot of women fussing over a little thing like this," said he, stoutly. "It isn't anything at all."

"No, it is not very serious, but all the same it had better be tied up, and I have something I want to put on it. I tell you what we will do. We will go around the back way. I will take you in the kitchen door and up the backstairs to my room, and doctor it unknown to anybody."

"I don't want Charlotte to know anything about it; she will be just silly enough to faint away again. Girls always do make such an awful fuss over nothing," said Eddy.

"All right," said Anderson. "Come along, my boy."

Anderson started, and the boy followed, but suddenly he stopped and ran back before Anderson dreamed what he was about. He stopped in front of the kennel, and danced on obviously trembling legs a dance of defiance before the frantic dog.

Anderson grabbed him by the shoulders.

"Come at once," he said, quite sternly.

Eddy obeyed at once. "All right," he said. "I just wanted him to see I wasn't afraid of him, that was all."

Eddy and Anderson entered the house through the kitchen door, ascended the backstairs noiselessly, and gained Anderson's room, where the wound was bound up after an application of a stinging remedy which the boy bore without flinching, although it was considerably more painful than the bite itself. He looked soberly down at his arm, now turning black and blue from the bruise of the dog's teeth, beside the inflamed spots where they had actually entered, while Anderson applied the violent remedy.

"Well," he said, "I suppose I was to blame. I ought to have minded you."

"Yes, I suppose you ought, my son," assented Anderson, continuing to handle the wound gently.

"And I suppose that is an exclusive dog. He doesn't like everybody going right up to him. Say, I guess he is a pretty smart dog, but I guess I should rather be his master than anybody else. He never bit you, did he?"

"No."

"I should think he would be an awful nice watch-dog," said Eddy.

Anderson bound the arm tightly and smoothly with a bandage. When the arm was finally dressed the jacket-sleeve could go over it, much to Eddy's satisfaction.

"Say, this jacket ain't paid for," he said. "Isn't it lucky that the man where Amy bought it didn't know we didn't have much money to pay for things lately and trusted us. If I had on my old jacket, the sleeves were so short and tight, because I had outgrown it, you know, I'd been hurt a good deal worse, and it was lucky we hadn't paid the Chinaman, too. It was real— What do you call it?"

"I don't know what you mean?" said Anderson, smiling.

"It was real— Oh, shucks! you know. What is it folks say when they don't go on a railroad train, and there's an accident, and everybody that did go is killed. You know."

"Oh, providential?"

"Yes, it was real providential."

"Suppose we go down."

"All right. Say, you mind you don't say a word about this to your mother or Charlotte."

"Yes, I promise."

"Your mother is an awful nice lady," said Eddy, in a whisper, descending the stairs behind Anderson, "but I don't want her fussing over me as if I was a girl, 'cause I ain't."

When the two entered the sitting-room, Charlotte started and looked at her brother.

"Eddy Carroll, what is the matter?" she cried.

"Nothing," declared the little boy, stoutly, but he manifestly tottered.

"Why, the dear child is ill!" cried Mrs. Anderson. "Randolph, what has happened?"

"Nothing!" cried Eddy, holding on to his consciousness like a hero. "Nothing; and I ain't a dear child."

"It is nothing, mother," said Anderson, quickly coming to his rescue.

Charlotte was eying wisely the knee of Eddy's knickerbockers. "Eddy Carroll," said she, with tender severity, "your knee must be paining you terribly."

Eddy quickly grasped at the lesser evil. "It ain't worth talking about," he responded, stoutly.

"I can see blood on your knee, dear. It must be bad to make you turn so pale as that."

With a soft swoop like a mother hen, Mrs. Anderson descended upon the boy, who did not dare resist that gentle authority. She tenderly rolled up the leg of the little knickerbockers and examined the bruised, childish knee. Then she got some witch-hazel and bound it up. While she was doing so, Eddy gazed over her head at Anderson with the knowing and confidential twinkle which one man gives another when tolerant of womanly delusion. He even indulged in an apparently insane chuckle when Mrs. Anderson finished, and smoothed his little, dark head, and told him that now she was sure it would feel better.

"Eddy," cried Charlotte, "what are you doing so for?"

"Nothing," replied Eddy. "I was thinking how funny I looked when I tumbled down." But he rolled his eyes, comically around at Anderson. His arm was paining him frightfully, and it struck him as the most altogether exquisite joke that Mrs. Anderson should be treating his knee, which did not pain him at all, so sympathetically.



Chapter XXVIII

During the progress of the tea at the Andersons' Eddy kept furtively glancing at his sister with an expression which signified congratulation.

"Ain't you glad you stayed?" the expression said, quite plainly.

"Did you ever have such nice things to eat? And only think what a snippy meal we should have had at home!"

Charlotte met the first of the glances with a covertly chiding look and an imperceptible shake of her head; then she refused to meet them, keeping her eyes away from her exultant brother. She herself was actually hungry, poor child, for the truth was that for the last few days it had been somewhat short commons at the Carrolls', and Charlotte was one of the sort who, under such circumstances, are seized with a sudden loss of appetite. She had really eaten very little for some hours, and now, in spite of a curious embarrassment and agitation, which under ordinary circumstances would have lessened her desire for food, she herself ate eagerly. The meal was both dainty and abundant. Mrs. Anderson had always prided herself upon the meals she set before guests. There was always in the house a store of sweets to be drawn from on such occasions, and while Anderson had been binding up Eddy's wound, the maid had been sent to the market for a chicken to supplement the beefsteak which had been intended for the family supper. So there was fried chicken and celery salad, and the most wonderful cream biscuits, and fruit and pound cake, and quince preserves—quarters of delectable, long-drawn-out flavor in a rosy jelly—and tea and thick cream and loaf-sugar in the old, solid service with its squat pieces finished with beading. Eddy gloated over it all openly. He fairly forgot his manners, for, after all, he was, although in a desultory sort of way, a well-bred boy. The Carrolls, as far as their manners went, were gentlefolk, and came of a long line of gentlefolk. But it happened that the china which had come to them from their forebears had for the most part been broken in the course of their wanderings from place to place, and in its place was an ornate and rather costly, and unpaid-for, set. Eddy now quite openly lifted the saucer of thin, pink-and-gold china, in which his teacup rested, and held it to the light.

"Whew, ain't it thin?" he ejaculated.

"Why, Eddy!" Charlotte cried, flushing with dismay.

"I don't care. It is awful thin," persisted the boy. He held the saucer before his eyes. "I can see you through it; yes, I can," said he.

But Mrs. Anderson, although her old-fashioned ideas of the decorous behavior due from children at table were somewhat offended, and she later told her son that it did seem to her that the boy must have been somewhat neglected, was yet very susceptible to flattery of those teacups, which had descended to her from her own mother, and which she had always regarded as superior to any of the Anderson family china, of which there was quite a store. So she merely smiled and remarked gently that the china was very old, and she believed quite rare, and it was, indeed, unusually thin, yet not a piece of the original set had been broken.

"Why didn't we have china like this instead of that we have?" demanded Eddy of Charlotte.

"Hush, dear," said Charlotte. "This china is so very old and valuable, you know, that not every one could—that we could not— I believe we had some very pretty china in our family, but it all got broken," she added.

"It didn't begin to be so pretty as this," said Eddy. "I remember it. The cups were like bowls, and there were black wreaths around them. There weren't any handles, either. I don't see why we couldn't have got some china as pretty as this. Suppose it was valuable. Why, I don't believe that we have now is paid for. What difference would it make?"

Charlotte blushed so that Mrs. Anderson felt an impulse to draw the poor, little, troubled head upon her shoulder and tell her not to mind.

"Let me give you some more of the quince preserve, dear," she said, in the softest voice; and Charlotte, who did not want it, passed her little glass dish to take advantage of the opportunity afforded her to cover her confusion.

"What difference would it make, say, Charlotte?" persisted Eddy.

"Hush, dear," said Charlotte, painfully.

"Here, son, pass your plate for this chicken," said Anderson; and Eddy, with a shrewd glance of half-comprehension from one to the other, passed his plate and subsided, after a muttered remark that he didn't see why Charlotte minded.

"Wasn't that a bully supper?" he whispered, pressing close to his sister when they entered the sitting-room after the meal was finished.

"Hush, dear," she whispered back.

"Ain't you glad you stayed? You wouldn't, if it hadn't been for me."

Charlotte turned and looked at him sharply. Mrs. Anderson had lingered in the dining-room to give some directions to the maid, and Anderson had stepped out on the porch for a second's puff at a cigar.

"Eddy Carroll," said she, in a whisper, "you didn't?"

Eddy faced her defiantly. "Didn't what?"

"You didn't tell a lie about that?"

Eddy lowered his eyes, frowned, and scraped one foot in a way he had when embarrassed. "Amy did say something about it was such a pleasant day and Addison," he replied, doggedly.

"But did she say they were really going there, and would not be back?"

"Anna said if they went there they could not get back."

"But did she say they were going? Tell me the truth, Eddy Carroll."

Eddy scraped.

"I see they did not," said Charlotte, severely.

"Eddy, I don't know what papa will say."

"I know," said Eddy, simply, with a curious mixture of ruefulness and defiance. Then he added: "If you want to be mean enough to tell on a feller, after he's been the means of your having such a supper as that (and you were hungry, too; you needn't say you wasn't; you ate an awful lot yourself), you can."

"I am not going to tell unless I am asked, when I certainly shall not tell a lie," replied Charlotte; "but papa will find it out himself, I am afraid, Eddy."

"I shouldn't wonder if he did," admitted Eddy.

"And then, you know—"

"Yes, I know; but I don't care. I have had that bully supper, anyhow. He can't alter that. And, say, Charlotte."

"What?" asked Charlotte, severely. "I am ashamed of you, Eddy."

"I don't see why papa don't get a store, like him"—he jerked an expressive shoulder towards the scent of the cigar smoke—"and then we could have things as good as they do."

But then Charlotte turned on him with fierceness none the less intense, although necessarily subdued. "Eddy Carroll," she whispered, with a long-drawn sibilance, "to turn on your father, a man like papa! Eddy Carroll! Poor papa does the best he can, always, always."

"I suppose he does," said Eddy, quite loudly. "My, Charlotte, you needn't act as if you were going to bite a feller. I've had enough of—"

"What?" asked Charlotte.

"Nothing," said Eddy. His arm was paining him quite severely. It had been quite an ordeal for him to manage his knife and fork at supper without betrayal.

"What were you going to say?" persisted Charlotte.

"Nothing," said Eddy, doggedly—"nothing at all. Don't act so fierce, Charlotte. It isn't lady-like. Amy never speaks so awful quick."

Charlotte began putting on her hat, which had been left on the sitting-room table. "I am ashamed of you," she whispered again. "I was ashamed of you all tea-time."

Eddy whistled in a mannish fashion. Charlotte continued adjusting her hat and smoothing her fluff of dark hair. Her face, in the mirror which hung between the two front windows, looked not so angry as sorrowful, and with a dewy softness in the pretty eyes, and a slight quiver about the soft mouth. Eddy glanced several times at this reflected face; then he stole, with a sudden, swift motion, up behind his sister, threw his arms around her neck, although it hurt him cruelly, and laid his boyish cheek against her soft, girlish one.

"No, you need not think that will make up," whispered Charlotte. But she herself pressed her cheek tenderly against his, and then laughed softly. "Try not to do so again, dear," she said. "It mortified me, and it is not being a credit to papa. Think a little and try to remember how you have been brought up."

"Charlotte," whispered Eddy, in the softest, most furtive of whispers, casting a glance over his shoulder.

"What is it, dear?"

"I suppose they"—he indicated by a motion of his shoulder his host and hostess—"are just as nice people as—we are—as the Carrolls."

"Of course they are," replied Charlotte, hastily. She pushed Eddy away softly and began to fuss again with her hat. "We must go home right away," she said, "or they will worry."

"There is no need of his going home with you, as long as I am here," said Eddy.

"Of course not," replied Charlotte.

But it seemed that Anderson himself had other views, and his mother also, for although a sudden and not altogether easy suspicion had come to her, she whispered aside to him that he must certainly accompany the two home.

"It is quite dark already," she said, "and it is not fit for that child to go alone with nobody but that boy, after the fright she has had this afternoon. She is just in the condition now when a shadow might upset her. You really must go with her, Randolph."

"I have no intention of doing anything else, mother," Randolph replied, laughing. He had been, indeed, taking his overcoat from the tree in the hall when his mother had come out to speak to him. Charlotte had said, on rising from the table, that she must go home at once.

Mrs. Anderson enveloped the girl in her large, gentle, lavender-scented embrace, and received with pleasant disclaimers her assurances of obligations and thanks; then she stood in the window and, with a little misgiving, and a ready imagination for future trouble, watched them emerge from the little front yard and disappear down the street under the low-growing maple branches which were turning slowly, and flashed gold over their heads in electric lights. She reflected judicially that while Charlotte was undoubtedly a sweet girl, and very pretty, very pretty, indeed, and, while her own heart was drawn to her, yet she would make no sort of wife for her son. She remembered with a shudder Eddy's remarks at the table.

"He is a pretty little boy, too," she thought, with a maternal thrill, remembering her own son at that age. When she returned to the dining-room to wash the pink-and-gold cups and saucers, in her little bowl of hot water on the end of the table, as was her custom when the best china had been used, the maid, who was clearing the table, and who had been encouraged to conversation from the lack of another woman in the house, and her mistress's habit of gentle garrulity, spoke upon the subject in her mind.

"Them was them Carrolls that lives in the Ranger place, was they not?" said she. The maid was a curious product of the region, having somewhat anomalously graduated at a high-school in New Sanderson before entering service, and gotten a strange load of unassimilated knowledge, which was particularly exemplified in her English. She scorned contractions, but equally scorned possessives and legitimate tenses. She wrote a beautiful hand, using quite ambitious words, but she totally misinterpreted the meaning of these very words in current literature, particularly the cook-book. Her bread was as heavy with undigested facts as is the stomach of a dyspeptic with food, but she was, in a way, a good servant, very faithful, attached to Mrs. Anderson, and a guileless purveyor of gossip, which rendered her exceedingly entertaining. She sniffed meaningly now in response to Mrs. Anderson's affirmative with regard to the identity of the recent guests.

"They did not fail to eat enough," said she, presently, packing up the plates and looking at her mistress, who was drying carefully a pink-and-gold cup on a soft towel.

"Yes, they seemed to relish the food," responded Mrs. Anderson.

The maid sniffed again, and her sniff meant the gratification of the cook who sees her work appreciated, and something else—an indulgent scorn. "Well, I guess there is reason enough for them relishing it," said she.

Mrs. Anderson made a soft, interrogatory noise, all that was consistent with her dignity and her sense of honor as a recent hostess towards departed guests.

The maid went on. "They do say," said she, "them as knows, that them Carrolls do not have enough to eat."

Mrs. Anderson made a little exclamation expressive of horror and pity.

"Yes, they do say so," the maid went on, solemnly. "They do say, them that knows, that them Carrolls be owing everybody in Banbridge, and have cheated folks that have trusted in them awful."

"Well, I am sorry if it is so," said Mrs. Anderson, with a sigh, "but of course this young lady who was here to-night and her little brother can't be to blame in any way, Emma."

The maid sniffed with a deprecating disagreement. "Mebbe they be not," said she. She was rather a pretty girl, in her late girlhood, thin and large-boned, with a bright color on her evident cheek-bones, and with small, sparkling, blue eyes. She was extremely neat and trim, moreover, in her personal habits, and to-night was quite gorgeously arrayed in a light silk waist and a nice black skirt. She was expecting her beau to take her to evening prayer-meeting. She was a very religious girl, and had reclaimed her beau, who had had a liking for the gin-mills previous to keeping company with her.

"Of course they are not," said Mrs. Anderson, with some warmth of partisanship, remembering poor little Charlotte's pretty, anxious face and her tiny, soft, clinging hands. She glanced, as she spoke, at the maid's large, red-knuckled fingers with a mental comparison.

The maid was fixed in her own rendering of English verbs, and had told her beau that her mistress did not speak just right, like most old folks.

"Mebbe they be not," she said, with firm doubt. Then she added, "It would not hurt them Carroll ladies, that young lady, nor her mother, nor her aunt, if they was to take hold, and do the housework them own selves, instead of keeping a girl, who they do not never pay."

"Oh, dear! Do you know that?"

"Indeed I do know that! Ed, he told me. He had it straight from them Hungarians who live in the house back of his married sister's. The Carroll girl, she goes there, and she told them, and them told Ed's sister."

"Perhaps she has had some of her wages. You don't mean she has not been paid at all?" Mrs. Anderson said.

"I mean not at all," the maid said, firmly. "That girl that works for them Carrolls has not been paid, not at all."

"Why does she remain there, then?"

"She would have went a long time ago if she not been afraid, lest, if she had went, it would have come about that she would have lost all she was going to lose as well as that which she had lost before," replied the girl, and Mrs. Anderson, being accustomed to her method of expression, understood.

"It is dreadful," she said.

"They say he has about ruined a great many of the people in Banbridge who have trusted them," said the maid, with a sly, keen glance at her mistress. She had heard that Mr. Anderson was one of the losers, and she wondered.

"They have paid my son promptly, I believe," said Mrs. Anderson, although a little reluctantly. She always disliked alluding to the store to her maid, much more so than towards her equals. But that the maid misunderstood. She often told her beau that Mrs. Anderson was not a bit set up nor proud-feeling, if her son did have a store. Therefore, to-night she understood humility instead of pride from her mistress's tone, and looked at her admiringly as she daintily polished the delicate pink-and-gold cups.

"I am very glad, indeed, that Mr. Randolph has not lost nothing through them," she replied.

"No, he has not," Mrs. Anderson repeated. "I dare say it is all exaggerated. The young lady who was here to-night seems like a very sweet girl."

Mrs. Anderson said that from a beautiful sense of loyalty and justice, while in her mind's eye she saw her beloved son walking along through the early night with the young lady on his arm, and perhaps falling desperately in love, even at this date, and beginning to think of matrimony with a member of a family about which such tales were told in Banbridge.

But the harm had been done long before she had dreamed of it, and her son had been very much in love with the girl on his arm before he had scarcely known her by sight. Anderson that night felt in a sort of dream. He was for the first time practically alone with Charlotte, for Eddy accompanied them very much after the fashion of an extremely lively little dog. He ran ahead, he lagged behind, and made dashes ahead with wild whoops. He hid behind trees, and sprang out at them when they passed. He was frequently startlingly obvious, but could not be said to actually be with them. He had wondered frankly, before they started, as to why Anderson wished to accompany them at all.

"I don't see why you want to go 'way up to our house when Charlotte has got me," he said. "Ain't you tired?"

Something in Anderson's persistency seemed to strike him as significant, for he walked behind them quite soberly, with his eye upon their backs in a speculative fashion at first; then he seemed to be seized with wild excitement, and began frantic demonstrations to attract Anderson's attention. In reality the boy was jealous, although nobody dreamed of such a thing.

"A man will never notice a feller when a pretty girl's around; and she ain't so very pretty, either," he said to himself. He regarded Anderson as his find, and was naturally indignant with Charlotte. So all the way home he darted and veered about them, in order to divert the man's mind from the girl to the faithful little boy, but with no avail. Once or twice Charlotte spoke reproachfully to him, and that was all. Anderson never spoke a word to him, and his grief and jealousy grew.

Anderson, walking along the shadowy street with Charlotte's little hand in his arm, would have been oblivious to much more startling demonstrations than poor Eddy's. He was profoundly agitated, stirred to the depths, and for that very reason he acquitted himself with more dignity and quiet calm than usual. He held himself with such a tight rein that his soul ached, but he never relaxed his hold. He told himself that it would be monstrous if by a word or gesture, by a tone of the voice, he betrayed anything to this little, innocent, timid, frightened girl on his arm. He never dreamed of the remotest possibility of dreams on her part. The soul beside him, seemingly separated only by thin walls of flesh, was in reality separated by an abyss of the imagination. But every minute his heart seemed to encompass her more and more tenderly, seemed to enfold her, shielding her from itself with its own love. Now and then he looked down at her, and the sight of the little, pale, flower-like face turned towards his with a serious, guileless scrutiny, like a baby's, caused him to fairly tremble with his passion of protection and adoration. They talked very little. Charlotte, if the truth were told, in spite of the tender nursing she had received, was still feeling rather shaken, and she had also a curious sense of timid and excited happiness, which tied her tongue and wove her thoughts even into an incoherent dazzle. When Anderson spoke, it was very coolly, on quite indifferent topics, and Charlotte answered him in her soft, rather unsteady little voice, and then conversation lagged again. It was on Anderson's tongue to question her closely as to her entire recovery from her fright of the afternoon, but he did not even do that, being afraid to trust his voice.

As they drew near the Carroll house, a doubt and perplexity which had been haunting Charlotte, assumed larger proportions, and Anderson himself had a thought also of the complication. Charlotte was wondering if she should ask him in. She was wondering what her mother and aunt would think. She knew what they would do, of course—that is, so far as their reception of the man who had befriended her, and whose mother had befriended her was concerned. They were gentlewomen. And she knew quite certainly about her father. But she wondered as to their real attitude, their mental attitude, and she wondered still more with regard to Anderson. Would he expect to be invited in? In what fashion did he read his own social status in the village. Anderson also was considering, during the last of the way, if he should enter the Carroll house and present his apologies and his mother's for having urged the fugitive members of the family to remain, and he wondered a good deal as to the desirable course for him to adopt, even supposing he were invited. While he had no consciousness whatever of any loss of prestige among people whom he had always known in the village, while, in fact, he never gave it a thought—yet he knew reasonably that outsiders might possibly look at matters differently, that his own unshaken estimate of himself, the estimate which was the same in a grocery-store as in a lawyer's office, might not be accepted. He recognized the fact with amusement rather than indignation, but he recognized it. He wondered how the girl would look at it all, whether she would ask him in to make the acquaintance of her family, and whether, if she did so he should accept.

But Charlotte came to have no doubt whatever that she should ask him. Suddenly a great wave of loyalty towards this new friend came over her, loyalty and great courage.

"Of course I shall ask him, when he has done all he has for me, he and his mother," she decided. "I shall, and I don't care what they think. I don't care. He is a gentleman, as much a gentleman as papa." Charlotte walked more erect, the pressure of her hand on Anderson's arm tightened a little unconsciously. When they reached the Carroll grounds she spoke very sweetly, and not at all hesitatingly.

"You will come in and let my family thank you for your kindness to me, Mr. Anderson," she said.

Anderson smiled down at her, and hesitated. "I do not require any thanks. What I have done was only a pleasure," he said. In his anxiety to control his voice, he overdid the matter, and made it exceedingly cool.

"He means he would have done just the same for any other girl, and it is silly for me to think he needs to be thanked so much for it," thought Charlotte, like a flash. She was full of the hair-splitting fancies of young girlhood in their estimate of a man. Her heart sank, but she repeated, still sweetly, though now a little more formally: "Then please come in and meet my father and mother and aunt. I should like to have you know them, and I am sure it would be a great pleasure to them."

"Thank you, Miss Carroll," Anderson said, slowly. Then, while he hesitated, came suddenly the sound of a shrill, vituperating voice from the house, a voice raised in a solo-like effect, the burden of which seemed both grief and rage, and contumely.

Eddy, who had given one of his dashes ahead, when they reached the grounds, came flying back. "Say," he said, "there's an awful shindy in the house. The dressmaker is pitching into papa for all she is worth, and there are some other folks, but she's goin' it loudest; but they are all going it! Cracky! Hear 'em!"

Indeed, at that second the solo became a chorus. The house seemed all clamorous with scolding voices. The door stood open, and the hall-light streamed out in the hall.

"Marie, she's in there, too," said Eddy, in an odd sort of glee, "and Martin. They are all pitching into papa for their money, but he's enough for them." It became evident why the boy's voice was gleeful. He was pitting his father, with the most filial pride and confidence, against his creditors.

Anderson held out his hand to Charlotte. "Good-night," he said, hastily, "and I hope you will feel no ill effects to-morrow from your fright." Then he was gone before Charlotte could say anything more.

"It's an awful shindy," Eddy said, still in that tone of strange glee, to his sister. To his great amazement, she caught him suddenly by his arm, the hurt one, but he did not flinch.

The girl began to cry. "Oh, Eddy!" she sobbed, pitifully. "Oh, Eddy dear!"

"What are you crying for, Charlotte?" asked Eddy, giving his head a rough caressing duck against hers. "Papa's enough for them; you know that. He ain't a mite scared."



Chapter XXIX

Anderson, as he went away that night, had before his eyes Charlotte's little face, the intensity of which had seemed to make it fairly luminous in the dim light, as she had turned it towards him. There was in that face at once unreasoning and childish anger that he was there at all, and in a measure a witness of the distress and disgrace of herself and her family, and a piteous appeal for help—at once a forbidding and a beseeching. For Anderson, naturally, the forbidding seemed most in evidence as an impulse to action. He felt that he must withdraw immediately and save them all the additional mortification that he could. So he hurried away down the road, with the girl's face before his eyes, and the sound of the scolding voice in the house in his ears. The voice carried far. In spite of the wrath in it, it was a sweet, almost a singing, voice, high-pitched but sonorous. It was the voice of little Willy Eddy's German wife, and it came from a pair of strong lungs in a well-developed chest, and was actuated by a strong and indignant spirit. Arthur Carroll, listening to her, was conscious of an absurdly impersonal sentiment of something like admiration. The young woman was really in a manner superb. The occasion was trivial, even ignoble. Carroll felt contemptuous both for her and for himself, and yet she dignified it to a degree. Minna Eddy was built on a large scale; she was both muscular and stout. Her short, blue-woollen skirt, increasing with its fulness her firm hips, disclosed generously her sturdy feet and ankles, which had a certain beauty of fitness as pedestals of support for her great bulk of femininity. She had come out just as she had been about her household tasks, and her cotton blouse, of an incongruous green-figured pattern, was open at the neck, disclosing a meeting of curves in a roseate crease, and one sleeve, being badly worn, revealed a pink boss of elbow. Minna Eddy had a distinctly handsome face, so far as feature and color went. It was a harmonious combination of curves and dimples, all overspread with a deep bloom, as of milk and roses, and her fair hair was magnificent. She had a marvellous growth both for thickness and length, and it was plaited smoothly, covering the back of the head as with a mat. She had come out with a blue handkerchief tied over her head, but she had torn it off, and waved it like a flag of battle in one fat, muscular hand as she lifted on high her voice of musical wrath. She spoke good English, although naturally tinctured by the abuses of the country-side. She had come to America before she could talk at all, and all her training had been in the country. The only trace of her German descent was in the sounds of certain letters, especially d and v. She said t for d, and f for v. Carroll noticed that as he noticed every detail. His senses seemed unnaturally acute, as possibly any animal's may be when at bay, and when the baiting has fairly begun.

A little behind Minna Eddy, and at her right, stood her husband, with a face of utter discomfiture and terror. Now and then he reached out a small, twitching hand and made an ineffectual clutch at her elbow as she talked on. At times he rolled terrified and appealing eyes at Carroll. He seemed even to be begging for his partisanship, although the absurdity of that was obvious.

"Oh, you other man," his eyes seemed to say, "see how terrible a woman can be! What can we do against such might as this?" The room was quite full of people, but Minna Eddy had the platform.

"You, you, you!" she repeated before every paragraph of invective, like a prelude and refrain. "You, you, you!" and she fairly hurled the words at Carroll—"you, you, you! gettin' my man"—with a fierce backward lunge of her bare right elbow towards her husband, who shrank away, and a fierce backward roll of a blue eye—"gettin' my man to take all his money and spend it for no goot. You, you, you! When I haf need of it for shoes and stockings for the children, when I go with my dress in rags. You, you, you!" She went on and on, with a curious variety in the midst of monotony. The stream of her invective flowed on like a river with ever-new ripples. There was a species of fascination in it for the man who was the object of it, and there seemed to be also a compelling quality for the others in the room. There had been no preconcerted movement among Carroll's creditors, but a number of them had that evening descended upon him in a body. In the parlor were the little dressmaker; the druggist; the butcher; Tappan, the milkman; the two stenographers, and Harrison Day, the clerk, who had come on the seven-o'clock train from New York; two men with whom he had dealings in a horse-trade; an old man who had made the garden the previous spring; and another butcher who had driven over from New Sanderson. In the dining-room door stood Marie, the Hungarian maid, and behind her was the coachman. Carroll stood leaning against the corner of the mantel-piece; some of the others were defiantly yet deprecatingly seated, some were standing. Anna Carroll, quite pale, with an odd, fixed expression, stood near her brother. When Charlotte entered the house, she took up a position in the hall, leaning against the wall, near the door. She could hear every word, but she was quite out of sight. She leaned heavily against the wall, for her limbs trembled under her, and she could scarcely stand. Her aunt had looked around as she entered, and a question as to where she had been had shaped itself on her lips: then her look of inquiry and relief had died away in her expression of bitter concentration upon the matter in hand. She had been alarmed about Charlotte, as they had all been. Mrs. Carroll had called softly down the stairs to know if Charlotte had come, and the girl had answered, "Yes, Amy dear."

"Where have you been, dear?" asked the soft voice, from an indistinct mass of floating white at the head of the stairs.

"I'll tell you by-and-by, Amy dear."

"I was alarmed about you," said the voice, "it was so late; about you and Eddy."

"He has come, too."

"Yes, I heard him." Then the voice added, quite distinctly petulant, "I have a headache, but it is so noisy I cannot get to sleep." Then there was a rustle of retreat, and Charlotte leaned against the wall, listening to the hushed turmoil surmounted by that voice of accusation in the parlor. Eddy stood full in the doorway, in a boyish, swaggering attitude, his hands on his hips, and bent slightly, with sharp eyes of intense enjoyment on Minna Eddy. Suddenly, Carroll turned and caught sight of him, and as if perforce the boy's eyes turned to meet his father's. Carroll did not speak, but he raised his hand and pointed to the hall with an upward motion for the stairs, and Eddy went, with a faint whimper of remonstrance. The scolding woman saw the little, retreating figure, and directly the torrent of her vituperation was turned into a new course.

"You, you, you!" she proclaimed; "dressin' your boy up in fine clothes, while mine children have went in rags since you have came to Banbridge! You, you, you! gettin' all my man's money, and dressin' up your boy in clothes that I haf paid for! You, you, you!"

But Minna Eddy had unwittingly furnished the right key-note for a whole chorus. Madame Griggs, who had been rocking jerkily in a small, red-plush chair which squeaked faintly, sprang up, and left it still rocking and squeaking.

"Yes," said she, "yes, that is so. Look at the way the whole family dress, at other people's expense!"

She was hysterical still, yet she had not lost her sense of the gentility of self-restraint. That would come later. Her face worked convulsively, red spots were on her thin cheeks, but there was still an ingratiating, somewhat servile, tone in her voice, and she looked scornfully at Minna Eddy. Then J. Rosenstein, who kept the principal dry-goods store in Banbridge, bore his testimony. His grievances were small, but none the less vital. His business dealings with the Carrolls had been limited to sundry spools of thread and kitchen towellings and buttons, but they were as lead in his estimate of wrong, although he had a grave, introspective expression, out of proportion to the seeming triviality of the matter in his mind. He held in one long hand a slip of paper, and eyed Carroll with dignified accusation.

"This is the fifth bill I have made out," he remarked, and he raised his voice to the pitch of his brethren of the Bowery when they hawk in the street. "The fifth bill I have made out, and it is only for one dollar and fifty-three cents, and I am poor."

His intellectual Semitic face took on an ignoble expression of one who squeezes justice to petty ends for his own deserts. His whine penetrated the rising chorus of the other voices, even of the butcher, who was a countryman of his own, and who said something with dolorous fervor about the bill for meat which had been running for six weeks, and not a dollar paid. He was of a more common sort, and rendered a trifle indifferent by a recent visit to a beer-saloon. He was also somewhat stupefied by an excess of flesh, as to the true exigencies of life in general. After he had spoken he coughed wheezily, settled his swelling bulk more comfortably in the red-velvet chair, and planted his wide-apart, elephantine legs more firmly on the floor, while he mentally appraised the Oriental rug beneath his feet, with a view to the possibility of his taking that in lieu of cash, and making a profitable bargain for its ultimate disposal with a cousin in trade in New York. Looking up, he caught Rosenstein's eyes just turning from a regard of the same rug, and the two men's thoughts met with a mental clash. Then the New Sanderson butcher, who was a great, handsome, blond man with a foam of yellow beard, German, but not Jew, strolled silently over to them, and with sharp eyes on the rug, conferred with the other two in low, eager whispers. From that time they paid little attention to what was going on around them. They talked, they gesticulated, they felt of the rug.

Madame Griggs, settling her skirts genteelly, spoke again. "I guess my bill has been running fully as long as anybody's here," she said, in her small, shrill voice. She eyed the two stenographers as she spoke, with jealous suspicion. There was a certain smartness about their attire, and she suspected them of being City dress-makers. She also suspected the strange young man with them of being a City lawyer, whom they had brought with them to urge their claims. Madame Stella Griggs had a ready imagination. The two stenographers had not spoken at all. From time to time the prettier wept, softly, in her lace-edged handkerchief; the other looked pale and nervous. Whenever she looked at Carroll her mouth quivered. The young man sat still and winked furiously. He had discovered Carroll's address and informed the girls, and they had planned this descent upon their employer. Now they were there, they were frightened and intimidated and distressed. They were a gentle lot, of the sort that are born to be led. Their resentment and sense of injustice overwhelmed them with grief, rather than a desire for retaliation. They were in sore straits for their money, yet all would have walked again into the snare, and they regarded Carroll with the same awed admiration as of old. No one but felt commiseration for him, and trust in his ultimate payment of their wages. They regarded the other creditors with a sort of mild contempt. They felt themselves of another kind, especially from the Germans and Jews. When Willy Eddy's wife had declaimed, one stenographer had whispered to the other, "How vulgar!" and the other had responded with a nod and curl of a lip of scorn. They met Madame Griggs's hostile regard with icy stares. The less pretty girl said to the young man that she thought it was mean for a dressmaker to come there and hound folks like that, and he nodded, winking disapprovingly at poor Madame Griggs, who was just then cherishing the wild idea of consulting him for herself in his supposed capacity of a lawyer. The stenographer, turning from her remark to the clerk, met the laughing but impertinent gaze of one of the horse-trading men, and she turned her back upon him with an emphasis that provoked a chuckle from his companion.

"Got it in the shoulder then, Bill," he remarked, quite audibly, and the other reddened and grinned foolishly. They were rough-looking men with a certain swagger of smartness. They regarded Carroll with a swearing emphasis, yet with a measure of reluctantly compelled admiration.

"I'll be damned if he ain't the first that ever got the better of Jim Dickerson," one had said to the other, as they had driven up to the house that evening. "I'll be —— damned if I see now how he got the better of me," the other rejoined, with a bewildered expression. As he spoke his mind revolved in the devious mesh of trap which he had set for Carroll, and realized the clean cutting of it by Carroll by the ruthless method of self-interest. Neither man had spoken besides a defiant response to Carroll's polite "Good-evening," when they had entered. They sat and watched and listened. Occasionally one raised a hand, and an enormous diamond glowed with a red light like a ruby. In the four-in-hand tie of the other a scarf-pin in the shape of a horse's head with diamond eyes caught the light with infinitesimal sparks of fire. Above it his clean-shaven, keen, blue-eyed face kept watch, sharply ready to strike anger as the diamonds struck light, and yet with a certain amusement. He had shown his teeth in a smile when Willy Eddy's wife pronounced her tirade. He did so again when she reopened, having regained her wind. When she spoke this time, she glared at Anna Carroll with a dazzling look of spite.

"There ain't no red silk dresses for me to rig out in," said she, and she pointed straight at Anna's silken skirts. "No, there ain't, and there won't be, so long as my man's money goes to pay for hers." She said "hers" with a harder emphasis than if she said "yours."

Anna never returned her vicious look, she never moved a muscle of her handsome face, nor changed color. She continued to stand beside her brother, with a curious expression of wide partisanship, and of regard for these people as objects of offence as a whole, rather than as individuals.

"Folks can pretend to be deaf if they want to," said Minna Eddy, "but they hear, an' they'll hear more."

"That was fifteen dollars beside the findings, and they amounted to twelve dollars and sixty-three cents more," said Madame Griggs, and this time she addressed the young man whom she took to be a lawyer. She met his nervous winks with a piteous smile of appealing confidence. She wondered if possibly he might not be willing to undertake her cause in connection with the other supposed dressmakers' at a reduced rate. Nobody paid the slightest attention when she spoke, Anna Carroll least of all.

Suddenly, Henry Lee tiptoed into the room. He came in smiling and nervous. When he saw the assembled company he started, and gave an inquiring glance at Carroll, who regarded him in an absent-minded fashion, as if he hardly comprehended the fact of his entrance. It was the glance of a man whose mind is too crowded to admit of more. But Lee went close to him, bowing low to Anna, and extending his hand with urbanity, flustered, it is true, yet still with urbanity.

"Good-evening, captain," he said, and even then, in sore distress of mind as he was, he looked about at the company for admiration for this proof of his intimacy with such a man.

"Good-evening," Carroll said, mechanically, and he shook hands. Anna Carroll also said "Good-evening," and smiled automatically.

"A fine evening," said Lee, but he got no rejoinder to that. He looked at the company, and his small, smug, fatuous face, which was somewhat pale and haggard, frowned with astonishment. Again he looked for information into Carroll's unanswering face. He looked at an empty chair near him; then he looked at Carroll and his sister standing, and did not seat himself. He also leaned against the mantel on the other corner from Carroll, and endeavored to assume an unconcerned air, as if it were quite the usual thing for him to drop into the house and encounter such a nondescript company. He looked across at the druggist and postmaster, and bowed with flourishing politeness. He said to Carroll, endeavoring to make his voice so unobtrusive that it would be unheard by the company, but with the non-success usual to a nervous and self-conscious man, that he had a word to say to him later on when he was at liberty, some matter of business which he wished to talk over with him.

"Very well," Carroll replied. Then Lee followed up his remark, which had in a measure reassured him.

"Got a cigar handy, captain?" said he. "I came off without one in my pocket."

Carroll took out his cigar-case and extended it to Lee, who took a cigar, bit the end off, and scratched a match. Carroll handed the case mechanically to the postmaster and Drake, who were near. They refused, and he took one himself, as if he did not realize what he was doing, and lit it, his calm, impassively smiling face never changing. He might have been lighting a bomb instead of a cigar, for all the actual realization of the action which he had. He accepted a light from Lee, who had lit his first with trembling haste. At the first puff which he gave, at the first evidence of the fragrant aroma in the room, one turbulent spirit, which had hitherto remained under restraint, burst bounds and overwhelmed all besides. Even Minna Eddy, who was fast warming to a new outburst, even Madame Griggs, who had both hands pressed to her skinny throat because of a lump of emotion there, and whose sunken temples were beating to the sight under the shade of her protuberant frizzes, looked in a hush of wonder and alarm at this furious champion of his own wrongs. Even the two butchers and the dry-goods merchant looked away from the glowing Oriental web upon which they stood. The weeping stenographer sat with her damp little wad of lace-edged handkerchief in her hand and stared at him with her reddened eyes; the other held her flaccid purse, and looked at the speaker. Now and then she nudged violently the friend, who did not seem to notice it.

Tappan, the milkman, arose to his feet. He had been sitting with a stiff sprawl in the corner of a small divan. He arose when the fragrance of that Havana cigar smote his nostrils like the odor of battle. He was in great boots stained with the red shale, for the roads outside Banbridge were heavy from a recent rain. He was collarless, his greasy coat hung loosely over his dingy flannel shirt. He was unshaven, and his face was at once grim and sardonic, bitter and raging. It was the face of an impotent revolutionist, who cursed his impotence, his lack of weapons, his wrong environments for his fierce spirit. He belonged in a country at war. He had the misfortune to be in a country at peace. He belonged in a field of labor wherein weapons and armed men, sown by the need of justice, sprang from the soil. He was in a bucolic pasture, with no appeal. He was a striker with nothing save fate against which to strike. He raged behind prison-bars of circumstance. Now, for once, was an enemy for his onslaught, although even here he was restricted. He was held in check by his ignoble need. He feared lest, in smiting with all the force at his command, the blow recoil upon himself. He feared lest he lose all where he might lose only part. But when he began to speak his caution left him. There was real fire in the grim, unshaven man; the honest fire of resentment against wrong, the spirit of self-defence against odds. He was big enough to disregard self-interest in his defence, and he was impressive. He sniffed as a preliminary to his speech, and there was in that sniff fury, sarcasm, and malignancy. Then he opened his mouth, and before the words came a laugh or the travesty of one. There was something menacing in his laugh. Then he spoke.

"Cigar!" he said. "Have a cigar? Will you have a cigar? Oh yes, a cigar." His voice was murderously low and soft. He even lisped slightly. "A cigar," he repeated. "A cigar. Oh, Lord! If men like me git a hand of chewing-tobacco once a month, they think they are damned lucky. Cigar, Lord!" Then the soft was out of his voice. He cut his words short, or rather he seemed to hammer them down into the consciousness of his auditors. He turned upon the others. "Want to know how that good-for-nothin' liar an' thief gits them cigars?" he shouted. "Want to know? Well, I'll tell you. I give 'em to him, an' you did. How many of you can smoke cigars like them, hey? Smell 'em. Ten or fifteen cents apiece; mebbe more. We give 'em to him. Yes, sir, that's jest what we did. He took the money he owed us for milk and meat and dress-makin' an' other things to buy them cigars. You got up early an' worked late to pay for 'em; he didn't. I got up at half-past three o'clock in the mornin'—half-past three in the winter, when he was asleep in his bed, damn him. The time will come when he won't sleep more than some other folks. I got up at half-past three o'clock, and I snatched a mouthful of breakfast, fried cakes and merlasses, that he'd 'a' turned up his nose at. He had beefsteak an' eggs at our expense, he did, an' I had a cup of damned weak coffee, cause I was too honest or too big a fool, whichever you call it, to buy any coffee I couldn't pay for. He'd 'a' turned up his nose at sech coffee. An' I went without sugar in it, an' I went without milk, so's to give it to him, so's he could git cigars. And as for cream, cream, cream! Lord! Couldn't git enough cream to give him. He was always yellin' for cream. Cream! My wife an' me would no more of thought of our puttin' cream in our coffee than we'd thought of putting in five-dollar gold pieces to sweeten it. No, we saved the cream for him. My wife don't look so young and fat as his wife. His wife has been fed on our cream." Tappan looked hard at Anna Carroll, whom he evidently took for Carroll's wife. He took note of her dress. "My wife never had a silk gown," said he. "Lord! I guess she didn't! She had to git up as early as I did, an' wash milk-pans, so we could give milk to that man, an' he could save money on us to git his wife a silk gown. Lord! Jest look—"

Then Madame Griggs spoke, her small, deprecatory snarl raised almost to hysterical pitch. She was catching the infection of this bigger resentment and sense of outraged justice.

"He didn't save money to git his wife that silk gown with your milk money," said she, "for I made that gown, an' I got the material, an' I 'ain't been paid a cent. That was one of the gowns I made when Ina was married. That silk cost a dollar and a quarter a yard. I could have got it at ninety-eight cents at a bargain, but that wa'n't good enough for her. He didn't take your milk money for that. He didn't take any money to pay anybody for anything he could run in debt for, I can tell you that. He must have paid somebody that wouldn't wait an' wouldn't be cheated."

"Must have been dealin' with a trust, then," said one of the horsemen, with a loud laugh. "Guess he's been cheatin' 'most everything else."

"And that lady ain't his wife, neither," said Madame Griggs to Tappan. "That's his sister. I made another gown for his wife, a lighter shade, an' I 'ain't been paid for that, neither." Suddenly she burst into a hysterical wail. "Oh, dear!" she sobbed. "Oh, dear! Here I've worked early an' late. Here I've got up in the mornin' before light an' worked till most dawn, an' me none too strong, never was, and always havin' to scratch for myself, a poor, lone woman, an' here I am in debt, an' they sendin' out for the money; an' I've worked so hard to build up my business, an' tried to make things nice, an' please, an' here I've got to fail. Oh, dear!" Suddenly she made a weak rush across the room, her silk petticoat giving out a papery rustle, her frizzes vibrating like wire under her hat, crested with ostrich plumes. She danced up to Carroll and looked at him with indescribable piteousness of accusation. "Why couldn't you, if you had to cheat, cheat a man an' not a woman like me?" she demanded, in her high-pitched tremolo.

Carroll took his cigar from his mouth and looked at her. His face was quite pale and rigid. Even Tappan stopped, watching the two. Madame Griggs held up, with almost a sublimity of accusation, her tiny, nervous, veinous hands. The fingers were long and the knuckles were slightly enlarged with strenuous pullings of needles and handling of scissors; the forefinger was calloused. "Look at my hands," said she. "See how thin they be. I've worked them 'most to the bone for your folks. I took a lot of pride in havin' your daughter look nice when she was married. If I was a man an' goin' to steal, I'd steal from somebody besides a woman with no more strength than I have, all alone in the world, and that's been knocked hard ever since she can remember." Then she brought a stiffly starched little handkerchief from the folds of a small purse, and she wept with a low, querulous wail like a baby. Standing before Carroll, "Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh—dear!" she wailed.

Carroll laid a hand on her shaking shoulder. It felt to him like a vibrating bone, so meagre it was. He bent over her and said something that the others did not hear, but her wild rejoinder gave them the key. She was fairly desperate; all her obsequiousness had disappeared. She was burning with her wrongs; she even took a certain pleasure in letting herself loose. She shook her shoulder free from his touch. She turned on him, her tearful, convulsed face uncovered, her frizzes tossing, as bold and unrestrained in her wrath as was Minna Eddy, who came forward to her side as she spoke.

"You needn't come wheedlin' around me," she cried. "I don't believe a word of it, not a word. I'll believe it when I see the color of your cash. You're dreadful soft-spoken, an' so is your wife an' your sister an' your daughters. Dreadful soft-spoken! Plenty of soft soap runnin' all over every time you open your mouth. I don't want soft soap. Soft soap won't buy me bread an' butter, nor pay my debts. Folks won't take any soft soap from me instead of money. They want dollars an' cents, an' that's what I want every time, dollars an' cents, an' not soft soap. Yes, it's dollars an'—cents—and not so-ft soa-p." Suddenly the dress-maker, borne high on a wave of hysteria, disclosing the innate coarseness which underlay all her veneer of harmless gentility and fine manners, raised a loud, shrill laugh, ending in a multitude of reverberations like a bell. There was about this unnatural metallic laughter something fairly blood-curdling in its disclosure of overstrained emotion. She laughed and laughed, while the room was silent except for that, and every eye was fixed upon her. Poor, little Estella Griggs, of all that accusing company of Arthur Carroll's petty creditors, had the floor. She laughed and laughed. She threw back her head. Her plumed hat was tilted rakishly one side; her frizzes tossed high above her forehead, revealing the meagre temples; her skinny throat seemed to elongate above her ribboned collar; her thin cheeks, folded into a multitude of lines by her distorting mirth, glowed with a hard red; her eyes gleamed with a glassy brilliance. Then, suddenly, that long, skinny throat seemed to swell visibly. She choked and gurgled, then came a wild burst of sobbing. Hysteria had reached its second stage. It was frightful.

"Good God!" said one of the horsemen, under his breath.

"That's so," said the other. "Let's git out of this."

They elbowed their way out of the room. "See you again," one of them said, curtly, to Carroll as he passed.

"See you to-morrow about that little affair of ours, an' by G—, you've got to pony up, you can take your oath on that, an' don't you forget it," whispered the other in Carroll's ear, with a fierce emphasis, and yet he half grinned with a masculine sympathy in this ultra crisis.

"It's gitting too thick," said the other horseman. "See you to-morrow, and, by G—, you've got to do somethin' or there'll be trouble."

Carroll nodded. He was ashy white. He had strong nerves, but he was delicately organized, man though he was, and with unusual self-control. He felt now a set of sensations verging on those displayed by the laughing, sobbing woman before him. He was conscious of an insane desire to join in that laugh, in those sobbing shrieks. His throat became constricted, his hands became as ice. The tragic absurdity of the situation filled him at once with a monstrous mirth and grief. The antitheses of emotion struggled together within him. He looked at the little, frantic creature before him, and opened his mouth to speak, but he said nothing. Anna Carroll caught his elbow.

"Come away, Arthur," she whispered.

She was trembling herself, but she had been braced to something of this kind from being a woman herself, and was not so intimidated. Carroll strove to speak again. Minna Eddy suddenly joined in her torrent of vituperation with the dress-maker's. She caught up the soft-soap idea with a peal of laughter more sustained than that of Madame Griggs, for she had a better poise of mentality, and her wrath was untempered with the grief and self-pity of a small, helpless woman who was fitted by nature for petting rather than for warfare.

"Soft soap!" shouted Minna Eddy, while her small husband vainly clutched at her petticoats. "Soft soap! Lord! I makes my own soft soap. I has plenty to clean with. I don't want no soft soap. I want money." She laughed loud and long, a ringing, mocking peal. Madame Griggs's loud sobbing united with it. The dissonance of unnatural mirth and grief was ghastly.

"Good God! Hear them!" whispered Sigsbee Ray to the druggist.

"I'd rather owe fifty men than one woman," the druggist whispered back.

Lee edged nearer the women and strove to speak. He had a purpose.

Carroll, gazing at the women in a fascinated way, again opened his mouth in vain, and again Anna dragged backward at his arm.

"For Heaven's sake, Arthur, come out of this," she whispered, and he yielded for the second. He let himself be impelled to the door, then suddenly he recovered himself and stepped forward with an accession of dignity and authority which carried weight even in the face of hysterical unreason. He raised his hand and spoke, and there was a hush. Madame Griggs and Minna Eddy remained quiet, like petrified furies, regarding the man's pale face of assertive will.

"I beg you to be quiet a moment and listen to me," he said. "I can do nothing for any of you to-night, and, what is more, I will not do anything to-night. It is impossible for me to deal with you in such an unexpected fashion as this, in such numbers. I have not gone into bankruptcy; no meeting of my creditors had been called. I have and you have no legal representative here. Now I am going, and I advise you all to do likewise. I beg you to excuse me. I know you all, I know the amount of my indebtedness to you all, and I promise you all, if I live, the very last dollar I owe you shall be paid. You must, however, give me a little time, or nobody will get anything. I will communicate with you all later on. Nobody shall lose anything, I say. Now you must excuse me."

"Look at him; he's sick," whispered the pretty stenographer to the other, whose soft, little sob of response alone broke the hush as Carroll went out with his sister at his side. Their shadows moved across the room as they ascended the stairs in the hall. The creditors, left alone, regarded one another in a hesitating fashion. The two women, Minna Eddy and Estella Griggs, remained quiet. Presently the two butchers and the dry-goods merchant, standing about the Oriental rug, quite a fine Bokhara, resumed their whispered colloquy regarding it, then they went out. Lee began talking to the druggist and the postmaster, with Willie Eddy at his elbow listening eagerly.

"Carroll's sick," said Lee, with a curious effect of partisanship towards himself, as well as Carroll. "He's sick, and it is too bad. His nerves are a wreck."

"Well, our nerves are becoming wrecks," the postmaster rejoined, dryly.

"That's so," said the druggist, with a worried look. "I don't know but I'll have to mortgage my stock. I've lost more than I can afford in that United Fuel."

"I don't like to own up I've been bit," said the postmaster, "but when it comes to being sick, and nerves being wrecks, there are others with full as much reason as Carroll."

"He'll pay up every cent," said Lee, eagerly.

"Maybe he will pay his debts," said the postmaster. "I am not going to say he won't. I suppose he means to. But when it comes to making things good, when he has simply led you by the nose into disastrous speculations, I don't know. Bigger men than Arthur Carroll don't do it."

"That's so," said Drew. "It's one thing to pay your butcher's bill in the long run, and be above stealing goods off the counter, but a man can cheat his fellow-men in a stock trade and think pretty well of himself, and other folks think well of him."

"That's so," said Sigsbee Ray.

"I haven't any doubt that he will arrange that," said Lee. "And, for that matter, the United Fuel may look up yet. I had a prospectus—"

"Prospectus be damned!" said the postmaster. He seldom used an oath, and his tongue made a vicious lurch over it.

The druggist gave an enormous sigh. "Well, it won't come up to-night, and I've left my little boy alone in the store," said he. "I've got to be going."

"So have I," said the postmaster. "My wife is alone."

"My wife always stands up for Carroll," said Lee, trotting nervously after the other men as they left the room. "Says she guesses he will end up by paying his bills as well as other men that are blaming him."

"Hope to God he will," said the postmaster.

The clerk and the two stenographers from Carroll's office had been having their heads together over a time-table. They also slipped out after the three men. The elder one still sniffed softly in her handkerchief.

The young man looked around at the stair up which Carroll had disappeared, and winked as he went out. There were left Carroll's coachman, the Hungarian girl, Madame Estella Griggs, Willy Eddy, and his wife. The coachman heard a noise of pounding in the stable and ran out. Marie remained in the doorway looking at the others with her piteous red eyes; Minna Eddy advanced towards her.

"They owe you your wages, don't they?" said she, with no sympathy, but rather a menace.

Little Marie shrank back. "Yis," said she, pursing her lips.

"You're a fool!" said Minna Eddy.

Marie smiled feebly at her.

Minna Eddy stood glaring around the room. Her husband was at her elbow, watching her anxiously.

"Come home now, Minna," he pleaded.

But she stamped her foot suddenly. "I ain't goin' to stand it!" she declared. "I'm goin' to take what I can get, I be." Her eyes rested first upon one thing, then another, then she looked hard at the Oriental rug, which the three tradesmen had discussed. Then she swooped upon it and began gathering it up from the floor.

"Oh, Minna! Oh, Minna!" gasped little Willy Eddy.

"You lemme be," she said, fiercely. "I see'd them men lookin' at this. It ain't handsome, but it's worth good money. I heard something they said. I ain't goin' to lose all that money. I'm goin' to take what I can git, I be."

"Minna, you—"

"Lemme be."

"It ain't accordin' to law, Minna."

"What do you s'pose I care about the law?" She turned to Estella Griggs, who was watching her eagerly, with a gathering light of fierce greed in her eyes. "If you take my advice you'll help yourself to something while you have the chance," said she.

"Oh, Minna, it's stealin'! You'll be liable—"

"Liable to nothin'. Stealin'! If folks don't steal no more 'n I do, I'll risk 'em. I'm a-takin' my lawful pay, I be. If you take my advice, you'll take somethin', too."

Minna Eddy moved from the room with the rug gathered up in a roll in her arms, but Marie had been gradually recovering herself. Now she came forward.

"You must not take that; that iss not your rug," said she. "You must not take that."

"Git out," said Minna Eddy. She thrust at the Hungarian with her rug-laden arms, but the little peasant was as strong as she. Marie caught hold of the rug and pulled; Minna also pulled.

"You lemme go," said Minna, with a vicious voice, but lowered, for obvious reason.

"You must not take that," said Marie. She was, however, rather fainter-hearted than the other woman.

Minna suddenly got the mastery. The Hungarian almost tumbled backward. Minna, with the rug, was out of the room, her trembling, almost whimpering husband at her heels. Madame Griggs looked at Marie. Her distorted face was at once greedy, anguished, and cunning. She began to gasp softly.

"Oh! Oh!" said she. "Oh!"

Marie regarded her in wondering agitation.

"Water! water! quick! Oh, get some water!" moaned Madame Griggs. "I am faint! Water!" She sank into a chair, her head fell back. She rolled her eyes at the terrified girl; she gasped feebly between her parted lips.

Marie ran. Then up rose Madame Estella Griggs. She swept the tea-table of its little Dresden service and some small, silver spoons. She gathered them up in a little, lace-trimmed table-cover, and she fled with that booty and a sofa-pillow which she caught from the divan on her way out.

When Marie returned she stood gaping with the glass of water. She was not over-shrewd, but she took in at once the situation. She understood that the second lady had fled like the first, with the teacups, the spoons, the table-cover, and the sofa-pillow. She stood looking desolately around the room, and her simple heart tasted its own bitterness.



Chapter XXX

Charlotte had followed her father and aunt up-stairs that night, starting up softly like a shadow from her place in the hall. She went silently behind them until they reached the open door of Anna's room; then her father turned and saw her.

"You here, Charlotte?" he said.

"Yes, papa," replied Charlotte, turning a pitiful but altogether stanch little face up to his.

He put his arm around her, drew her head against his shoulder, tipped up her face, and kissed her. "Go to bed now, darling," he whispered.

"Papa, I can't; I—"

"There is nothing you can do, sweetheart; there is nothing for you to worry about. Papa will take care of you always, whatever happens. Go to bed now, and go to sleep, honey."

"But, papa, I can't sleep. Let me stay and—"

"No, dear. There is nothing you can do. It will only worry me to have you stay. Go to bed, and put all this out of your mind. It will all come right in the end."

Carroll kissed Charlotte again, and put her gently from him, and she disappeared in her own room with a suppressed sob.

"I am glad Ina is out of the way," Anna said, but with no bitterness.

"So am I," Carroll agreed, simply.

"I wish Charlotte had as good a man to look out for her," said Anna.

Carroll straightened himself with quick pride. "I shall look out for her," he said. "You need not think I am quite out of the running yet, when it comes to looking out for my own flesh and blood."

"No, of course you are not, Arthur. I did not mean to imply any such thing," Anna rejoined, hastily. "I was only— Come into my room. Amy is fast asleep by this time, and if she is not she has a headache, and you might as well try to consult with an infant in arms as Amy with a headache. And something has to be done."

"Yes, you are right, Anna," Carroll replied, with a heavy sigh.

"Those people will all go when they get tired of waiting. There is no use in our bothering with them any more to-night. Come in."

Anna led the way into her room, and closed the door. A lamp burned dimly on the dresser amid a confusion of laces and ribbons. The whole room looked in a soft foam of dainty disorder. Anna did not turn the light up. She stood looking at her brother in the half-light, and her face was at once angry and tender.

"Well?" said she, with a sigh of desperate inquiry.

"Well?" rejoined Carroll.

"What next?"

"The Lord knows!"

"Something has to be done. We are up against a dead wall again. And for some reason it strikes me as a deader wall than ever before."

Carroll nodded.

"We cannot stay in Banbridge any longer?" Anna said, interrogatively.

"We may have to," Carroll replied, curtly.

"You mean?"

"There may be a little difficulty about getting out. We could not leave the State, anyhow, and—"

"And what? We can go somewhere else in the State, I suppose. I am not particularly in love with this section of the union, but it all makes little difference after one reaches a certain point."

"Poor old girl!" said Carroll.

Anna looked at him, and her eyes suffused and her mouth quivered. Then she smiled her usual smile of mocking courage, even bravado. "Oh, well," said she, "I have faced the situation and chewed my cud of experience for a good many years now, and I am used to it. I may even end up by tasting the sweet in the bitter."

"You had as hard an experience in another line as I had. I don't know but it was harder."

"No harder, I reckon," Anna replied, almost indifferently. "It was the same thing—the doll stuffed with sawdust, and all that; you with a friend, and I with a lover. Well, it is all over now."

"It isn't; that is the worst of it," Carroll said, gloomily.

"I don't see why."

"A sequence is never over. There is even all eternity for it."

"Well, the first of the sequence is over, anyhow. All we have to consider is the succeeding stages."

"That is about enough."

Anna laughed. "I agree with you there, dear. Well, I suppose the stage of the sequence for immediate consideration is the feasibility of emerging into the next stage. You think it is likely to be more difficult for the wandering tribe of Carroll to make their exodus with grace and dignity than usual?"

"It rather looks that way now."

"I suppose that promoting business, that business transacted in the New York office, got you into rather hotter waters than usual."

Carroll nodded.

"There was an office, I suppose."

Carroll nodded again, laughing a little. Anna laughed too. "One never knows," said she. "I suppose that was a delegation from the office, to-night, the two pretty girls and the winking young man."

"Yes," said Carroll.

Anna had flung herself into an easy-chair beside him. Carroll remained standing. She leaned her head back and crossed her hands behind her neck in a way she had. She was a thing of lithe grace in her soft red silk. The dim light obliterated all the worn lines in her face. Carroll regarded her even in the midst of the distressful stress of affairs with a look of admiration. It was an absent-minded regard, very much as a mourner might notice a stained-glass window in a church while a funeral was in progress. It was the side-light of grace on affliction involuntarily comprehended, from long training, by the exterior faculties. Carroll even said, half perfunctorily: