"I won't promise anything at all," asserted Nancy, hitching her angular shoulders; "more'n likely, I'll tell 'em just what I think. I ain't afraid of hurtin' their feelin's, for they hain't got any. I think money's a good deal like your skin; it keeps you from feelin' things that make you smart dreadfully when you get it knocked off." Robert smiled feebly, and rubbed his moist, yielding hand across his wife's misshapen knuckles. "Well, then, you hadn't ought to be hard on 'em, Nancy; it's no more'n natural to want to save your skin," he said, closing his eyes wearily. "Robert Watson?" The teller of the Merchants' and Fruitgrowers' Bank looked through the bars of his gilded cage, and repeated the name reflectively. He did not notice the eager look of the woman who confronted him, but he did wonder a little that she had failed to brush the thick dust of travel from the shoulders of her rusty cape. The teller was a slender, immaculate young man, whose hair arose in an alert brush from his forehead, which was high and seemed to have been polished by the same process that had given such a faultless and aggressive gloss to his linen. He turned on his spry little heel and stepped to the back of the inclosure, where he took a handful of long, narrow papers from a leather case, and ran over them hastily. Nancy did not think it possible that he could be reading them; the setting in his ring made a little streak of light as his fingers flew. She watched him with tense earnestness; it seemed to her that the beating of her heart shook the polished counter she leaned against. She hid her cotton-gloved hands under her cape for fear he would see how they trembled. The teller returned the papers to their case, and consulted a stout, short-visaged man, whose lips and brows drew themselves together in an effort of recollection. The two men stood near enough to hear Nancy's voice. She pressed her weather-beaten face close to the gilded bars. "I am Mrs. Watson. I came down to see you about it; my husband's been poorly and couldn't come. We'd like to get a little more time; we've had bad luck with the barley so far, but we think we can make it another season." The men gave her a bland, impersonal attention. "Yes?" inquired the teller, with tentative sympathy, running his pencil through his upright hair, and tapping his forefinger with it nervously. "I believe that's one of Bartlett's personal matters," he said in an undertone. The older man nodded, slowly at first, and then with increasing affirmation. "You're right," he said, untying the knot in his face, and turning away. The teller came back to his place. "Mr. Bartlett, the cashier, has charge of that matter, Mrs. Watson. He has not been down for two or three days: one of his children is very sick. I'll make a note of it, however, and draw his attention to it when he comes in." He wrote a few lines hurriedly on a bit of paper, and impaled it on an already overcrowded spindle.