Dinner had just reached the salad stage, when the maid whispered to Catherine, in mysterious tones, that there was a gentleman in the hall who wished to see her. "Mr. Livingston!" she gasped, and rushed out. "How fortunate that dinner is almost over! But perhaps the poor man is starving. Oh! but I can't have him in. I'll be hard-hearted. I'll hope that he had a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk at Broad Street Station. But what a strange man for father to send!" Catherine thought as she cordially grasped the hand of a beery object in the dark corner of the hall. "I beg yir pardin, miss, but I'm Jim Maloney, and me wife as does yir laundree is very poor, en has siven childrin en wants to be paid." The man held toward her a soiled, rumpled half sheet of lined paper. "One dollar and twenty-nine cents," Catherine read between the blots, and remarked to herself that there were only five children last week. But supposing there had been twins, she ran singing upstairs and munificently raised the amount to one dollar and thirty cents. "The dollar and a quarter is easy, but four cents is such a difficult amount!" she said, excusing her extravagance, while taking her seat at the dinner table again. "One always has to hunt through all one's coat pockets, stamp boxes, and various trays and receptacles on the bureau, and do at least fifty cents' worth of nervous worry and scurry, perhaps even then not finding the four cents." Catherine was happy again, for she still had forty minutes of liberty, ample time in which mentally to run through a possible conversation with an inquisitive elderly gentleman and arrange all her material in paragraphs with a suitable introduction and conclusion. She felt as if she were going to make an address, and had a wild desire to begin. "Esteemed elderly gentleman, it gives me great pleasure to expound to you this evening the--etc." But of course that would never do. At exactly five minutes after eight Mr. Livingston's card was handed to Catherine. "Elderly and investigating gentlemen are exasperatingly prompt," she murmured. "He has evidently taken the 7:15 train from the city and has killed time about the campus or been lost for ten minutes," she thought, as she glided downstairs, settling the bow of her ribbon collar primly in front. "Yes, Mr. Livingston," she rehearsed, "the freshman class contains one hundred and seven girls, average age, eighteen; average height, five feet five inches; average weight---- Oh, dear me! I've forgotten my average weight, and that was to have led to such interesting discussions of the comparative amount of nutriment in the different preferred foods."