"Well!" said Miss Shott, and for a few moments she sat silent. Then she spoke. "I suppose Mrs. Cliff's goin' to take boarders." "Boarders!" cried Willy. "What makes you say such a thing as that?" "If she isn't," said Miss Shott, "I don't see what she'll do with all the rooms in that new part of the house." "She's goin' to live in it," said Willy. "That's what she's goin' to do with it!" "Boarders are very uncertain," remarked Miss Shott, "and just as likely to be a loss as a profit. Mr. Williams tried it at the hotel summer after summer, and if he couldn't make anything, I don't see how Mrs. Cliff can expect to." "She doesn't expect to take boarders, and you know it!" said Willy. Miss Shott folded her hands upon her lap. "It's goin' to be a dreadful hard winter. I never did see so many acorns and chestnuts, and there's more cedar berries on the trees than I've ever known in all my life! I expect there'll be awful distress among the poor, and when I say 'poor' I don't mean people that's likely to suffer for food and a night's lodging, but respectable people who have to work hard and calculate day and night how to make both ends meet. These're the folks that're goin' to suffer in body and mind this winter; and if people that's got more money than they know what to do with, and don't care to save up for old age and a rainy day, would think sometimes of their deserving neighbors who have to pinch and suffer when they're going round buyin' rugs that must have cost at least as much as twenty dollars apiece and which they don't need at all, there bein' carpet already on the floor, it would be more to their credit and benefit to their fellow-beings. But, of course, one person's conscience isn't another person's, and we've each got to judge for ourselves, and be judged afterwards!" Now Willy leaned forward in her chair, and her eyes glistened. As her body grew colder, so did her temper grow warmer. "If it's Mrs. Cliff you're thinkin' about, Nancy Shott," said she, "I'll just tell you that you're as wrong as you can be! There isn't a more generous and a kinder person in this whole town than Mrs. Cliff is, and she isn't only that way to-day, but she's always been so, whether she's had little or whether she's had much!" "What did she ever do, I'd like to know!" said Miss Nancy. "She's lined her own nest pretty well, but what's she ever done for anybody else--" "Now, Nancy Shott," said Willy, "you know she's been doin' for other people all her life whenever she could! She's done for you more than once, as I happen to know,--and she's done for other neighbors and friends. And, more than that, she's gone abroad to do good, and that's more than anybody else in this town's done, as I know of!" "She didn't go to South America to do good to anybody but herself," coolly remarked the visitor.