Mrs. White could not guess, and her husband continued: “In the first place, he has given notice that he will quit my tenement for a larger house at the end of the next quarter; and I don’t like it. No, sir! I don’t like it. I never fancied the fellow. Puts on the fine gentleman too much for a chap as poor as I suppose he is. But he’s a good tenant—one of the very best; pays up to the hour, and never asks for repairs, papering nor nothing; while the rest of ’em in White Row hound me, spring and fall, for paper or paint, but mostly paper, which I believe they tear off as fast as it is put on. Old Nancy Sharp had the impudence to ask me for screens to keep the flies out! Lord Harry! they’ll want gas or electric lights next! But what beats me is Tom Grey’s setting up so high. Says he has lately come into possession of quite a little money. He has been West for some weeks, and has just got home, and is going to take a better house, and wants to rent the vacant rooms next to the Bank; and for what, do you suppose? You’d never guess.” Mrs. White didn’t try, and he went on: “For a bank! A private bank! To be known as Grey’s Bank! Think of it—a one-horse bank, side by side with mine! It’s a piece of impertinence, and I would have refused outright, if the place had not been vacant so long, and I hadn’t had such pesky work with the last man, who went off leaving me in the lurch to the tune of three hundred dollars.” Here the judge stopped to take breath, while his wife asked, “Where did he get the money to start a bank with?” “The Lord only knows,” her husband replied. “Was poor as Job’s turkey when he came here. Why, didn’t his wife do some sewing for you?” Mrs. White nodded, and the judge went on: “And now he has money for a bank! Gambled for it, maybe, when he was gone. He is just the quiet, sly sort of a fellow to do that thing.” “Mr. Grey never gambled, I know he didn’t,” Herbert spoke up. “He’s a gentleman, if he is poor, and he has been through college. Louie told me so, and you have only been to common schools!” Herbert was quite eloquent in his defense of Mr. Grey, but his father frowned him down by saying, “You seem to be posted in Mr. Grey’s affairs—too much so—and I want you to keep away from there—carrying home that girl’s books and umbrella! Remember who you are.” Herbert’s answer was to leave the room and slam the door behind him, while his father continued: “That boy is too thick with the Grey girl, and if her father gets into a bank, it will be worse yet. I think I’ll not let him have it.” “But,” his wife rejoined, “if you do not rent to him some one else will, and your rooms will stay vacant. Don’t be foolish. It isn’t likely he can run more than a year.”