“Well,” replied Louis, reddening deeply, “it seems that the slippers I—we—made for—for—Miss Randolph were very much admired. Miss Dare ordered a pair just like them before she left, to be sent after her to Paris, but her mother will pay for them; and at least twenty pairs have been ordered since then, for Commencement slippers. Annie Rolf, you know, works in the pottery, in the decorating-room; and of course hasn’t time for such a job as that; and if Freddy could do it, we could get a good price for him, for the extra work, and it would be a great accommodation to us.” “Freddy will be delighted,” said Alice quietly; “and—you know what a help the money will be, Louis.” She stroked the fair hair from his brow with a motherly touch, thinking how much older and paler he had grown in these last weeks. But Alice did not know how her own troubles had helped Louis. His was the temperament to resist the first force of any shock, and sink beneath the consequent re-action. He had not resented or despised Pinkie’s scorn, for there was no anger in his heart towards her; but he had rallied his forces to the defence of a life, a world, which he felt intuitively were in essentials, in aim and possibility, nobler and purer than that from which she ventured to look down upon him. Only when she was far away did he realize that hope, light, and color had gone out of his life so utterly as is only possible at eighteen. Then, he had one day found Alice in tears, and, when his tender questioning had drawn her troubles from her, Louis had gained a new object to live for. So now when she said, “I don’t know what I should do without you, Louis,” he clasped and kissed her like a son. “I don’t believe I could have loved my own mamma better than I do you,” he said; “why can’t I work for you as a son would do?” But Alice shook her head. Not while they could keep body and soul together in any other way, she said, and perhaps she judged rightly as to what was best for herself, though Louis’ suggestion might have been best for him. But one cannot receive benefits involving money—or often confer them—under our present social system, without certain moral deterioration; it will be different when the next development of the kingdom has made it impossible to look upon one’s own things without looking also on the things of others. Louis did not know, however, of the one Tantalus-drop in Alice’s cup. Henry Randolph, upon leaving home, had been careful to inform her of a very liberal sum of money which lay in bank subject to her order. She had told her husband of it; for it was very bitter to her to be obliged to conceal from him even a thought; and—he had left her at liberty to do as she would. “A useless wretch like me,” he had said, “unable to take care of his own family, has no right to quarrel with the hand that saves them from starvation. Only—don’t tell me, Alice, which loaf of bread is bought with that money, for I think a crumb of it would choke me.”