Sam yawned behind his paper. "I'm really too sleepy to give to the question the profound attention which it merits; but to-morrow when my intellect is fresh and keen, I'll endeavour to----" "You mean you don't care." "Suppose I did care, my very dear Betty; suppose my whole career depended upon what Hickey said--or didn't say; what could I do about it?" "I'm sure I don't know, Sam," said his Elizabeth meekly. But her eyes were still full of speculative curiosity as she went up-stairs. XIII The facts in the case, if known to Elizabeth, might have served to throw a clearer light upon Miss Tripp's somewhat unsatisfactory account of her day in the city. In the first place, the weather which had dawned bright and sunny had suddenly turned nasty, with a keen wind driving large, moist snowflakes into the faces of pedestrians. Evelyn had found herself without an umbrella and wearing her best hat and gown walking the long block which intervened between her destination and the car from which she had alighted. Mrs. Baxter Crownenshield was known to the wide circle of her acquaintances as a large, funereal person, invariably clothed in black, and as perpetually exuding a copious and turgid sympathy upon all who came in contact with her, somewhat after the manner of a cuttle-fish. She lived in a mansion, large and dull like herself, on Beacon Street, where she occupied herself exclusively with those dubious activities euphemistically called "charitable work." When Miss Evelyn Tripp was shown into Mrs. Crownenshield's chilly reception-room that morning in February, she shivered a little in her damp clothes as she sat down on a slippery chair and endeavoured vaguely to forecast the coming interview. Her mother had suggested Mrs. Crownenshield as a sort of _dernier resort_, with a fretful reminiscence of the days when the Baxter Crownenshields were poor and lived in a third-story back room of a fifth-rate boarding-house. "I used to give Jane Crownenshield my gowns after I had worn them a season," Mrs. Tripp said querulously; "and glad enough she was to get them. As for her husband, he was not much of a man. Your father used to say Crownenshield couldn't be trusted to earn his salt at honest work in a counting-room; but when the war broke out he borrowed five hundred dollars of your father, and bought and sold army stores. After that he grew rich somehow, and we grew poor. But Jane Crownenshield ought to remember that she owes everything she has to-day to your father."