Mr. Martel was sitting in the arm-chair in an attitude _King Lear_ might have envied. Every line of his face and figure suggested unmitigated tragedy. Even the tender ministrations of Eleanor Bartlett who knelt beside him, failed to console him or to stem the tide of his lamentations. "What's the matter?" cried Quin in alarm. "What has happened?" Papa Claude, resting one expressive hand on Eleanor's head, extended the other to Quin. "Come in, my boy, come in," he said brokenly. "You are one of us: nothing shall be kept from you in this hour of great affliction. I am ruined, Quinby--utterly, irrevocably ruined!" "But how? What's happened?" "It's grandmother!" exclaimed Eleanor, struggling to her feet and speaking with dramatic indignation. "She's written him a letter I'll never forgive--never! I don't care if the money _is_ due me. I don't want it. I won't have it! What is six thousand dollars to me if it turns Papa Claude out in the street?" "But here--hold on a minute!" said Quin. "What's all the racket about?" "It's about money," Mr. Martel roused himself to explain--"the grossest and most material thing in the world. Years ago Eleanor's father and I entered into a purely personal arrangement by which he advanced me a few thousand dollars in a time of temporary financial depression, and as a mere matter of form I put up this house as security. Had the dear lad lived, nothing more would ever have been said about it. He was the soul of generosity, a prince among men. But, unfortunately, at his death he left his mother Eleanor's trustee." "And she has simply _hounded_ Papa Claude," Eleanor broke in. "She has tried to make him pay interest on that old note every single year, when she knew I didn't need the money in the least. And now she had notified him she will not renew the note on any terms." "She can't collect what you haven't got, can she?" Quin asked. "She can sell the roof over our heads," said Papa Claude, with streaming eyes lifted to the object referred to. "She can scatter my beloved family and drive me back into the treadmill of teaching. And all through this blessed, innocent child, who would give all she has in the world to see her poor old grandfather happy!" Again Eleanor, moved to a passion of sympathy, flung her arms around him, declaring that if they made him pay the note she would refund every penny of it the day she was twenty-one. But Papa Claude was not to be consoled. "It will be too late," he said hopelessly. "All I required was one year more in which to retrieve my fortunes and achieve my life ambition. And now, with success almost within my grasp, the goal within sight, this cruel blow, this bolt from the blue----" "Haven't you got any other property or stocks or insurance that you could turn over?" asked Quin, who felt that the occasion demanded numerical figures rather than figures of speech.