“It seems to me I’ve been told all this a good many times, Aunt Sabrina,” said Albert, as his aunt stopped and glared at him trembling with the excitement of her peroration. “There’s nothing very-pleasant in it, for either of us, to listen to or talk about; but I don’t see that there’s anything more than I’ve heard over and over again, except about your having on another woman’s dress, and I don’t assume that I am expected to interfere about _that!_” Poor Miss Sabrina was too deeply moved, and too much in earnest, to note the sarcastic levity underlying the lawyer’s conclusion. She caught only the general sense of a negative response, and looked at her nephew steadily with a gaze half-indignant, half appealing. “Then you won’t dew anything, ay?” she asked at last. “Oh, I am very far from saying that. _That’s_ another thing. You send for me, saying that you have an important communication to make to me--at least, I assume that it is important, from the circumstances surrounding the request. I come, and you first insist that I know as well as you do what you mean, and then, when I demur, you rehearse all the unfortunate details of my father’s failure in life. I suggest that these are already tolerably familiar to me, and _this_ mild statement you construe as a definite refusal on my part to do something--what, I don’t know.” “I declare, Albert, you better send in a bill fer givin’ me this consultation. _I_ never knew a son who could take his father’s ruin ’n’ his fam’ly’s disgrace so cool, before. I s’pose _that’s_ th’ lawyer of it, tew!” “Perhaps it’s an advantage that some one of the family should keep cool, Aunt, and look at things one by one, in their true relation. Now, if you have any proposition to make to me, any plan to present for my consideration, I should like to hear it--because really this other style of conversation is profitless beyond description. In a word, what do you want me to do?” “What do I want yeh to do?” The old maid leaned forward and put a thin, mitted hand on Albert’s knee, looking eagerly into his face, and speaking almost shrilly. “I want yeh to take this farm, to come here to live, to make it a rich gentleman’s home agin! to put the Fairchilds up once more where my father left ’em.” “Yes?” was the provokingly unenthusiastic response. Miss Sabrina felt that she had failed. She put her spectacles on, and took the Bible into her lap, as if to say that she washed her hands of all mundane matters. But it did not suit Albert to regard the interview as closed.