"Happened? Oh, I don't know. I've lost my job." "Lost? Burton Brothers?" I was all at sea. He nodded. "They're closing out; the manager's in town to-day. He told us...." By degrees I got it out of him. Burton Brothers thought they saw hard times ahead, they were closing out a number of their smaller establishments, centering everything on their Chicago house. Suddenly my thought leaped up. "But couldn't they give you something there ... in Chicago?" I was dizzy for a moment with the wild hope of it. Never to live in Higgleston any more--but Tommy cut me short. "They've men who have been with them longer than I have to provide for.... I asked." "Oh, well, no matter. The world is full of jobs." Looking for one appealed to me in the light of an adventure, but because I saw how pale he was I went to him and began to kiss him softly. By the way he yielded himself to me I grasped a little of his lost and rudderless condition, once he found himself outside the limits of a salaried employment. I began to question him again as the best way of getting the extent of our disaster before us. "What does Mr. Rathbone say?" Rathbone was our working tailor, a thin, elderly, peering man of a sort you could scarcely think of as having any existence apart from his shop. He used to come sidling down the street to it and settle himself among his implements with the air of a brooding hen taking to her nest; the sound of his machine was a contented clucking. "He was struck all of a heap. They're better fixed than we are." Tommy added this as an afterthought as likely to affect the tailor's attitude when he came to himself. "They" were old Rathbone and his daughter, one of those conspicuously blond and full-breasted women who seem to take to the dressmaking and millinery trades by instinct. As she got herself up on Sunday in her smart tailoring, with a hat "from the city," and her hair amazingly pompadoured, she was to some of the men who came to our church, very much what the brass teakettle was to me, a touch of the unattainable but not unappreciated elegancies of life. Tommy admired her immensely and was disappointed that I did not have her at the house oftener. "They've got her business to fall back on," Tommy suggested now with an approach to envy. He had never seen Miss Rathbone as I had, professionally, going about with her protuberant bosom stuck full of pins, a tape line draped about her collarless neck, and her skirt and belt never quite together in the back, so he thought of her establishment as a kind of stay in affliction.