"Oh, my dear!" sighed Miss Tripp, "I am changed; everything has changed with me, I assure you. Mother and I are obliged to live off air, exactly like wee little church mice. And I am simply worn to a fringe trying to economise and manage. I never was extravagant; you know that, dear, but now----. Well; I don't know what will become of us unless something happens." "Something will happen, dear," said Elizabeth, more than ever warm-heartedly determined to make her friend as happy as herself. "Now I'm going to leave you to lie down and rest a little before dinner," she added guilefully, as she bethought herself of the various culinary operations already in progress under the unthinking control of Celia. "A friend of Sam's--a Mr. Hickey, chances to be dining here to-night; I hope you won't mind, dear. It--just happened so." Miss Tripp turned to gaze searchingly at her friend. "You can't mean George Hickey--a civil engineer?" she asked. "Why, yes; do you know him?" "My dear; it's the oddest thing; but lately I seem to meet that man wherever I go. He is a friend of the Gerald Doolittles in Dorchester--you know who I mean--and spends a Sunday there occasionally; and when I was visiting Leticia Marston last fall, lo and behold! Mr. Hickey turned up there for the week end! I used to know him years ago when we were both children." "Sam is associated with Mr. Hickey in a professional way," observed Elizabeth, with a careful indifference of manner. "He dines with us once in a while." She paused to listen, with her head on one side, while a look of alarm stole over her attentive face. "What's the matter, dear?" inquired the unaccustomed Miss Tripp. "Do you hear anything?" "No, Evelyn; I don't, and the silence is suspicious. I think I'll run down stairs and see what the boys are doing. Try and rest, dear, till I call you." And Elizabeth accomplished a hasty exit by way of the back stairs and the kitchen, where she was in time to frustrate the intelligent Celia as she was about putting the French peas over to boil an hour before dinner time. From thence she sought the sitting-room, where she had left her two sons amicably engaged in constructing a tall and wobbly tower out of building blocks. Carroll had vanished, and her amazed and indignant eyes lighted upon the person of her youngest son kneeling in a chair before the forbidden aquarium, over which he leaned in a state of rapturous oblivion of past experiences, his plump hands buried in the sand at the bottom of the tank, while the alarmed gold fish flashed in and out between the dripping sleeves of his freshly-ironed blouse. "Richard Brewster!" she cried. Then wrath and a disheartening sense of the futility of unassisted moral suasion quite swept her off her feet. She seized the child and laying him across her lap in time-honoured fashion, handed down from a remote ancestry, spanked him with a speed and thoroughness not to be surpassed by Grandmother Carroll in her most energetic mood. VII