“Oh, _I_ know,” she said; and although she laughed with an effect of carelessness, that look which I had thought “far away” returned to her eyes as she spoke. There was a certain inscrutability about Miss Apperthwaite sometimes, it should be added, as if she did not like to be too easily read. “I've heard all about it. Mr. Beasley's been appointed trustee or something for poor Hamilton Swift's son, a pitiful little invalid boy who invents all sorts of characters. The old darky from over there told our cook about Bill Hammersley and Simpledoria. So, you see, I understand.” “I'm glad you do,” I said. A little hardness--one might even have thought it bitterness--became apparent in her expression. “And I'm glad there's SOMEbody in that house, at last, with a little imagination!” “From everything I have heard,” I returned, summoning sufficient boldness, “it would be difficult to say which has more--Mr. Beasley or the child.” Her glance fell from mine at this, but not quickly enough to conceal a sudden, half-startled look of trouble (I can think of no other way to express it) that leaped into it; and she rose, for the lunch-bell was ringing. “I'm just finishing the death of Jean Valjean, you know, in Les Miserables,” she said, as we moved to the door. “I'm always afraid I'll cry over that. I try not to, because it makes my eyes red.” And, in truth, there was a vague rumor of tears about her eyes--not as if she had shed them, but more as if she were going to--though I had not noticed it when I came in. ... That afternoon, when I reached the “Despatch” office, I was commissioned to obtain certain political information from the Honorable David Beasley, an assignment I accepted with eagerness, notwithstanding the commiseration it brought me from one or two of my fellows in the reporter's room. “You won't get anything out of HIM!” they said. And they were true prophets. I found him looking over some documents in his office; a reflective, unlighted cigar in the corner of his mouth; his chair tilted back and his feet on a window-sill. He nodded, upon my statement of the affair that brought me, and, without shifting his position, gave me a look of slow but wholly friendly scrutiny over his shoulder, and bade me sit down. I began at once to put the questions I was told to ask him--interrogations (he seemed to believe) satisfactorily answered by slowly and ruminatively stroking the left side of his chin with two long fingers of his right hand, the while he smiled in genial contemplation of a tarred roof beyond the window. Now and then he would give me a mild and drawling word or two, not brilliantly illuminative, it may be remarked. “Well--about that--” he began once, and came immediately to a full stop. “Yes?” I said, hopefully, my pencil poised. “About that--I guess--” “Yes, Mr. Beasley?” I encouraged him, for he seemed to have dried up permanently. “Well, sir--I guess--Hadn't you better see some one else about THAT?”