There were four other days when the report seemed to need judicious editing, and in this I did not prove remiss. As the telegraph company remained indifferent, I could see that no harm was done. For at last came a bulletin of seventeen words which left us assured that Little Miss had conquered. Henceforth we could receive the things without that stifling dread, that eager fearfulness of the eyes to read all the words in one glance. Leisurely could we learn that Little Miss was getting back her strength, and Miss Caroline and I could laugh at Clem's fear that she also would find herself "pah'lyzed in th' frame." After that Miss Caroline and I were free to consider another matter, weighty enough with pneumonia out of the running. This was a matter of ways and means--of sheer, downright money. When Clem, in the first days of his sickness, had warned Miss Caroline that she would not be let to waste "all that gold money," his lofty reference, as a matter of cold figures, was to a sum less than nine dollars. I forget the precise amount, but that is near enough--nine dollars, in round numbers. And the winter had been an expensive one. At the lowest time of doubt, when Miss Caroline had affairs of extreme gravity to face, I had spoken to her incidentally of money that I owed to Clem for services performed, and I had, in fact, paid several instalments of the debt as money seemed to be needed. When Clem's recovery was assured and I urged Miss Caroline to go to Little Miss, she asked me bluntly what sum I had owed Clem. I felt obliged to confess that it was not more than two hundred dollars. This must have surprised Miss Caroline as much as it rejoiced her, for she took up the matter with Clem, and in so clumsy a fashion that he, perhaps owing to his enfeebled condition, witlessly made a confession at variance with mine, and with an effect of candor that moved his questioner to take his word rather than that of an officer and a gentleman. Of course this was not at all like Clem. In referring to sums of money due him he had ever been wont to chant them with a bard-like inflation that recognized only sums of a vague but immense rotundity. I had never known him to be thus prosaic, and I suspected that Miss Caroline had, in a sudden impulse of doubt, terrified him into being so brutally explicit. Whence fell a coldness between Miss Caroline and me, for the discrepancy between Clem's confession and mine was not slight. Even my mutterings about interest having accumulated were put down as the desperate resource of embarrassment. Miss Caroline did not even dignify them with her notice, and the coldness increased. Yet, while it was a true coldness, it was distinguished by a certain alien quality of warmth, for Miss Caroline, though now on guard against any mere vulgar benevolence of mine, talked to me frankly, as she had never done before, about her situation.