It seemed to Helen that the girl went out slowly, a sudden spot of colour on each of her cheeks. "You call her Fanny!" Helen asked, when, the door shut again. "Yes," he said, busy with the checks. "They do more for you, when you are decent with them." "You think so?" He caught the meaning in her voice and sighed a little as he sprawled his signature on the next check. "I often wish I was a sour, old crab," he said, half to Helen and half to himself. "I'd get through life a whole lot better than I do." Mary had come to the door then, ready to start for home. When Helen passed through the outer office she saw the girl again, her cheek on her palm, her head bent over her desk, dipping her pen in the red ink and then pushing the point through her blotter pad. None of this was lost on Helen, nor the girl's frown, nor the row of crimson blotches that stretched across the blotter. "She'll go in now to get those checks," thought Helen, as the car started up the hill, and it was just then that Mary started to warn her about going out so much with Burdon. Once in the night Helen awoke and lay for a long time looking at the silhouette of the windows. "...I wonder what they said to each other...." she thought. The next morning Mary was going through her mail at the office when she came to an envelope with a newspaper clipping in it. This had been cut from the society notes of the New Bethel _Herald_. "Burdon Woodward has a specially designed new car which is attracting much attention." The clipping had been pasted upon a sheet of paper, and underneath it, the following two questions were typewritten: "How can a man buy $8,000 cars on a $10,000 salary? "Why don't you audit his books and see who paid for that car?" Mary's cheeks stung with the brutality of it. "What a horrible thing to do!" she thought. "If any one paid attention to things like this--why, no one would be safe!" She was on the point of tearing it to shreds when another thought struck her. "Perhaps I ought to show it to him," she uneasily thought. "If a thing like this is being whispered around, I think he ought to get to the bottom of it, and stop it.... I know I don't like him for some things," she continued, more undecided than ever, "but that's all the more reason why I should be fair to him--in things like this, for instance." She compromised by tucking the letter in her pocket, and when Judge Cutler dropped in that afternoon, she first made him promise secrecy, and then she showed it to him. "I feel like you," he said at last. "An anonymous attack like this is usually beneath contempt. And I feel all the more like ignoring it because it raises a question which I have been asking myself lately: How _can_ a man on a ten thousand dollar salary afford to buy an eight thousand dollar car?" Mary couldn't follow that line of reasoning at all. "Why do you feel like ignoring it, if it's such a natural question?" she asked.