"No; I will keep the whole, and credit him the balance, on account of seven dollars he has owed me these two months, for work for his wife." He stammered something about mistake--not him--cursed blunder--and left the room. The dress fitted beautifully, and Athalia felt the soothing influence of praise for her work, and would have left happier than she came, but just then her ear caught a voice in the next room. She listened. A woman replied: "Yes, if you have brought any money. I have made up my mind that you shall not stay in this room another night without you give me more money." "Oh, Josephine, I have got something better than money for you. Look here." "Oh! you are a dear good fellow, after all. What a pretty watch, and what a dear little locket. That will do. Now you may stay all night, and to-morrow we will go down to Coney Island again, and have a good time. I'll pass for your wife, you know." There was a door opening out of Nannette's room into a bath-room, and out of that, a window into the room where the voices came from. It was but a thought; thoughts are quick, and so were her's, and the step that took her up on a chair, and her hand up to the curtain, which was the only thing preventing her from seeing who owned that voice. She looked. What a sight for a wife! She saw, what she knew before, but would be doubly sure, that the voice was her husband's. She knew that--she knew that he was giving her watch, and the locket which contained the donor's likeness, that of a dear brother lost at sea--a treasure that she would not part with sooner than her own heart--to a woman to whom he had before given money--money that came, drop by drop, distilled from her heart's blood, through the alembic of her needle; and she would see--what woman would not--what wife could resist the opportunity of seeing?--she could not--what the woman looked like, who could displace her in her husband's affections. The first sight she caught was her Bible upon the table. "What could she want of that?" She was sometimes religious--a great many of them are, and read the Bible to find some text to justify their own course. They are also visited by clergymen, who prefer those of "a religious turn of mind." Then this Bible was elegantly bound, and very valuable. Then she saw her watch in the hands of a woman with ugly red hair, with dull, voluptuous eyes, thick lips, ugly teeth, a little snub nose, and a gaunt awkward figure, forming altogether one of the ugliest looking women, Athalia thought, that she had ever seen. The words burst involuntarily from her lips: "Oh, how ugly!" "She is uglier than she looks," said Nannette. "She has ruined more men than any other woman in the city. She has kicked that fool out half a dozen times because he did not give her more money. I should not wonder now, if he has stolen his wife's watch to give that wretch." And this was the woman that Athalia had been toiling for her husband to pamper. Oh, how she did pray to die!