Mr. Binney shook hands with her and took the chair to which she had motioned him. He did not speak, but the compressed upper lip and the thoughtful look with which he regarded Mrs. Higginbotham caused a slight fluttering in that lady's ample bosom. With a woman's instinct she immediately knew as surely as if he had already told her what he had come to say. "He's going to do it to-day," she said to herself, and true to the tactics of her sex she set herself at once to ward off the critical moment as long as possible. She plunged into conversation of the sprightly religious order, for Mrs. Higginbotham was a good woman and could talk by the hour together of preachers and movements and causes, in which conversation Mr. Binney was quite capable of holding his own, for he and Mrs. Higginbotham sat under the same preacher and held the same theological views. There was another point in common between them, and while Mrs. Higginbotham is struggling to maintain a bright and lively conversation, to which Mr. Binney replies only by terse monosyllables, there will be time to explain what this was. Both Mr. Binney and Mrs. Higginbotham had a soul above their surroundings. In the case of Mr. Binney this has already been indicated by the way in which, while conducting his business on the most approved lines of commercial progress, he essayed to import into it something better and nobler than the mere pushing of his wares and the piling up of a fortune. Those cartoons from Raphael had infused a love of art into many humble homes, and not a few minds had been enriched by the perusal of Binney's Shakespeare (a play given away with every sack of his food for poultry), to such an extent that the deterioration of eyesight brought about by the quality of paper and print with which those masterpieces were issued was a very small matter in consideration of the mental enlightenment which had been diffused throughout the country.