"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it must have been the sleet, what mustn't it have been?" "Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a handful of gravel at the window." "And then you were to run down with his bag and help him to make his escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don't know that I blame him. If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave myself--though I hope I shouldn't sneak away. And if Mrs. Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here, two weeks' board, we'd walk off together arm-in-arm at high noon. I can't understand how he ever came to advance her the money." Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the tops of his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you'll find, as you live long, that there are several things you can't explain." "I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll get Mrs. Betterson to take your loan for my debt, and we'll go at once." "You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace in your first pettifogging case." "I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts of meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious about the cuts, if she didn't treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I mustn't be too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don't suppose his diet had anything to do with the deep damnation of the late Betterson's taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?" "Not when there isn't a fire in it." "I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes advantage of the old lady's indebtedness to him. There seem," he added, philosophically, "to be just two occupations open to widows who have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones, boarding-housing for old ones. It _is_ rather restricted. What do you suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery at the best." Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them. "How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?" he asked Briggs. "You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I think he doesn't know himself."