"Sure, I kin have thim masses said for me mother--rest her sowl!" she said, crossing herself fervently; and the next moment, in gleeful anticipation: "An' buy me a black silk, Docthor, a black silk dhress, me that hasn't had a new rag to me back for eight years!" She went; and Doctor Vardaman sat down before his table. He took out the colonel's fifty-dollar bill--the colonel's! It was Mrs. Maginnis', like all the rest of the bills in that handsome Russia-leather case! The doctor was as sure of it as if it had been sworn to in his presence. He stared at it miserably. Of course, he told himself, he had known all along that Pallinder was a humbug, had known in a sort of way that he was a scamp. But the truth is, you and I, even the most experienced, even the wisest and worldliest and most wary of us, knows very little about scamps. The doctor had lived his seventy years with such vicissitudes as fall to the lot of the ruck of mankind, and had encountered no greater rascality than that of some patient who ignored a bill or refused to pay it--an offence which he himself was the first to excuse or condone. By nature a humane and sympathetic man, he had learned in his profession a large charity, a habit of making allowances which he now denounced savagely for a contemptible shirking of responsibilities. _Laissez faire_, indeed! And one-half the world, not knowing how the other half lives, need not care! Yes, Pallinder was a scamp; but Doctor Vardaman found, with a wretched surprise, that he had had no real comprehension of what the word meant--the thing it denoted. This was its meaning, this shabby trickery, this cheap deceit; the discovery came upon him like a blow. There is an extraordinary bitterness to any generous mind in beholding the uncovered shame of a friend; we hate to see the feet of clay; the pain is two-edged and strikes us either way with the sense of his unworthiness, of our own folly. The doctor had liked Pallinder; liked him still--liked him and despised him. He sat wondering at his own weakness. "If it had been me," thought the old gentleman, "if it had been me that he had cheated, fleeced, bamboozled in this way, or anyone of my class, I could almost say the game was fair and have my laugh at the dupe; it's our business to know better. But that poor old woman, that poor, ignorant, faithful, trusting creature, that honest, simple drudge!" He thought of her tired, work-worn hands in those pitiful gloves with a throb of pain and unreasoning self-reproach. Colonel Pallinder's hands were large, white, and very well-kept; a seal ring in pretty taste, _simplex munditiis_, adorned his little finger, the only piece of jewelry he wore. It was paid for, if at all, the doctor reflected grimly, out of the pocket of some other Mrs. Maginnis. The flavour of the colonel's cigar was yet on his lips; what washerwoman, what widow, what patient, laborious wage-earner's little savings had paid for _that_? He got up and walked the floor restlessly.