"I see. I'm sorry." There was nothing of humility in the little bow he made from the waist. Ten minutes earlier you would never have thought him capable of so finished an act as that bow. He walked to the folding doors that led to the hall. On the way his glance fell on the portrait of old Isaac Thrift over the liver-coloured marble mantel. It was a fine portrait. One of Healy's. Adler paused a moment before it. "Is that a good portrait of your father?" "It is considered very like him." "It must be. I can see now why my grandfather took his part to the last." "Took his part!" But her tone was a shade less corroding. "In what, if you please?" "Grandfather lost his fortune when a firm he trusted proved--well, when a member of it proved untrustworthy." When he grew older he was always ashamed of having thus taken a mean advantage of a woman. But he was so young at the time; and she had hurt him so deeply. He turned again now, for the door. And there stood Lottie, brave, but not quite brave enough. She was not wearing her white dress--her party dress, for the evening. Her mother had forbidden her to come down. And yet here she was. Braver--not much, but still braver--than Charlotte had been before her. "I--I can't go, Ford," she faltered. "It's all right," he said, then. And there, before the white-haired, relentless, and disapproving Carrie Payson he went up to her, put one lean dark hand on her shoulder, drew her to him and kissed her, a funny little boyish peck on the forehead. "Good-bye, Lottie," he said. And was gone. Lottie's being needed at home began before the failure of Aunt Charlotte's sight. Aunt Charlotte had to go to the eye specialist's daily. Lottie took her. This was even before the day of the ramshackle electric. Lottie never begrudged Aunt Charlotte the service. Already between these two women, the one hardly more than twenty, the other already past sixty, there existed a curious and unspoken understanding. They were not voluble women, these two. Lottie never forgot those two hours in the waiting room of the famous specialist. Every chair was occupied, always. Silent, idle, waiting figures with something more crushed and apprehensive about them than ordinarily about the waiting ones in a doctor's outer room. The neat little stack of magazines on the centre table remained untouched. Sometimes, if the wait was a long one, Lottie would run out for an hour's shopping; or would drop in at her mother's office. Mrs. Payson usually was busy with a client; maps, documents, sheafs of blue-bound papers. But if one of her daughters came downtown without dropping in at the office she took it as a deliberate slight; or as a disregard of parental authority. Lottie hated the door marked: CARRIE THRIFT PAYSON REAL ESTATE BONDS MORTGAGES "Oh, you're busy."