"Cousin Edwin, are you ever going to collect that money from Robert? He promised to pay you on or before the fifteenth of November, and now it's nearly the last of the month and you haven't a line of explanation from him yet. I told you he wouldn't pay it till we made him. You oughtn't to've let him run away in your debt at all, and you wouldn't either, if you'd a'listened to me. Why don't you write to him?" "Well, I don't like to press the poor fellow. He's lost his money you know, and I reckon he finds it hard to pull through till January. He'll pay when he can, I reckon." "O that's always the way with you! For my part I don't believe he had any money in the bank; and besides he said there was some money coming to him on his salary, and he promised faithfully to pay you out of that. I told you he wouldn't, because I knew him. He tried to make out he was so much superior to the rest of us, and talked about 'reforming' poor Ewing, just as if the poor boy was a drunkard and--and--and--if you don't write I will, and I'll make him pay that money too, or I'll know why." The conversation ended as such conversations usually did in Maj. Pagebrook's family, namely, by the abrupt departure of that gentleman from the house. Cousin Sarah Ann evidently meant what she said, and her husband was no sooner out of the house than she got out her desk and wrote; not to Robert, however, but to Messrs. Steel, Flint & Sharp, attorneys and counselors at law, in New York city. Her note was not a long one, but it told the whole story of Robert's indebtedness from a not very favorable point of view, and closed with a request that the attorneys should "push the case by every means the law allows." This note was signed not with Cousin Sarah Ann's own but with her husband's name, and her first proceeding, after sealing the letter, was to send it by a servant to the post-office. She then ordered her carriage and drove over to Shirley. CHAPTER XX. _Cousin Sarah Ann Takes Robert's Part._ Cousin Sarah Ann talked a good deal. Ill-natured people sometimes said she talked a good deal of nonsense, and possibly she did, but she never talked without a purpose, and she commonly managed to talk pretty successfully, too, so far as the accomplishment of her ends was concerned. In the present case, while I am wholly unprepared to say exactly why she wanted to talk, I am convinced that this excellent lady's visit to Shirley was undertaken solely for the purpose of securing an opportunity to talk. Arrived there, she greeted her friends with her black-bordered handkerchief over her eyes, and for a time seemed hardly able to speak at all, so overpowering was her emotion. Then she said: "I wouldn't think of visiting at such a time as this, of course, but Shirley seems so much like home, and I felt like I must have somebody to talk to who could sympathize with me. Dear Sudie was _so_ good to me during--during it all."