“Would you not rather rest until after supper or have a night’s sleep before you pain yourself by telling us? We do not wish to force any confidence, only naturally we feared that you were ill. Your room, by chance, was aired to-day, and the bed-making is only a minute’s work,” said Mrs. Lawton, rising and laying her hand soothingly upon Keith’s shoulder, as a hint that she might perhaps like to retire, which would have been an unspeakable relief. Not she! Keith West’s nature, blended curiously as it was of Scotch and New England granite, was softest and most retiring in triumphant, happy moods, but in adversity, unsparing and unflinching. “What I have to tell won’t improve by keeping,” she said by way of answer. “To begin with, I ought to have known better, after all my farming experience, than to buy a pig in a poke, a cow over seven, or a horse without knowing its age, and expect a bargain.” “You seemed to be having a delightful time in Boston when you last wrote,” ventured Brooke, quietly, in an endeavour to hasten and focus the explanation, which, being epigrammatically expressed, acquired vagueness thereby. “Yes, I did at first, until I found out that my friend Mrs. Dow was charging her car fare up to me when she took me about, and that her company, with which the house was so full that I had to take a third story back, were boarders, and I was charged double rates because I’d only come for what she called the ‘cream of the season.’ I didn’t find all this out until the first month’s payday, and then I overlooked it because I know learned men never get big salaries and I felt for Judith’s pride. The next shock was that Mr. Dow, who I supposed was at the very least a professor or something in the museum and, as they say, ‘counted an honourable position above high pay,’ was only the janitor! One day when I was out alone I called on him, and the door man said the only person of that name about the place was tending the furnace in the cellar. As I stood on the sidewalk, hesitating, wondering if I had mistaken the place, up popped Dow’s head through the coal-hole!