"I don't, I don't," said Ellen, fiercely. "I want you just as you are, just exactly as you are, mother." Fanny laughed tearfully, and rubbed her coarse black head against Ellen's lovingly with a curious, cat-like motion, then bade her run away or she would not get her dress done. A dressmaker was coming for a whole week to the Brewster house to make Ellen's outfit. Mrs. Zelotes had furnished most of the materials, and Andrew was to pay the dressmaker. "You can take a little more of that money out of the bank," Fanny said. "I want Ellen to go looking so she won't be ashamed before the other girls, and I don't want Cynthia Lennox thinking she ain't well enough dressed, and we ought to have let her do it. As for being beholden to her for Ellen's clothes, I won't." "I rather guess not," said Andrew, but he was sick at heart. Only that afternoon the man from whom he had borrowed the money to buy Ellen's watch and chain had asked him for it. He had not a cent in advance for his weekly pay; he could not see where the money for Ellen's clothes was coming from. It was long since the "Golden Hope" had been quoted in the stock-list, but the next morning Andrew purchased a morning paper. He had stopped taking one regularly. He put on his spectacles, and spread out the paper in his shaking hands, and scrutinized the stock-list eagerly, but he could not find what he wanted. The "Golden Hope" had long since dropped to a still level below all record of fluctuations. A young man passing to his place at the bench looked over his shoulder. "Counting up your dividends, Brewster?" he asked, with a grin. Andrew folded up the paper gloomily and made no reply. "Irish dividends, maybe," said the man, with a chuckle at his own wit, and a backward roll of a facetious eye. "Oh, shut up, you're too smart to live," said the man who stood next at the bench. He was a young fellow who had been a school-mate of Ellen in the grammar-school. He had left to go to work when she had entered the high-school. His name was Dixon. He was wiry and alert, with a restless sparkle of bright eyes in a grimy face, and he cut the leather with lightning-like rapidity. Dixon had always thought Ellen the most beautiful girl in Rowe. He looked after Andrew with a sharp pain of sympathy when he went away with the roll of newspaper sticking out of his pocket. "Poor old chap," he said to the facetious man, thrusting his face angrily towards him. "He has had a devil of a time since he begun to grow old. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Wait till you begin to drop behind. It's what's bound to come to the whole boiling of us." "Mind your jaw," said the first man, with a scowl. "You'd better mind yours," said Dixon, slashing furiously at the leather.