"I appreciate your confidence in me," he answered, "all the more because I feel my entire inadequacy to the situation. The person who could tell it as you ought to hear it is the young woman who waylaid me with tears near Lafayette Park about half an hour ago. She is a very young woman, in fact, an infant, who is legally united in marriage to another infant, who has been in the employ of the government, in the building I adorn with my presence. Why they felt it incumbent upon themselves to marry on an income of seventy-five dollars a month they do not explain in any manner at all satisfactory to the worldly mind. They did so, however, and lived together for several months in what is described as a state of bliss. They had two small rooms, and the female infant wore calico gowns, and did her own ridiculous, sordid, inferior housework, and rejoiced in the society of the male infant when a grateful nation released him from his daily labors." Agnes quietly slipped into the chair he had first placed for her. She did it with a gentle, yielding movement, to which he was so little blind that he paused a second and looked at the fire, and made a point of resuming his story with a lighter air than before. "They could not have been either happy or content under such absurd circumstances," he said; "but they thought they were. I used to see the male infant beaming over his labors in a manner to infuriate you. His wife used to come down to bear him from the office to the two rooms in a sort of triumphal procession. She had round eyes and dimples in her cheeks, and a little, round head with curls. Her husband, whose tastes were simple, regarded her as a beauty, and was given to confiding his opinion of her to his fellow-clerks. There was no objection to him but his youth and innocence. I am told he worked with undue enthusiasm in the hope of keeping his position, or even getting a better one, and had guileless, frenzied dreams of being able, in the course of the ensuing century, to purchase a small house 'on time.' I don't ask you to believe me when I tell you that the pair actually had such a house in their imbecile young minds, and had saved out of their starvation income a few dollars toward making their first payment on it. I didn't believe the man who told me, and I assure you he is a far more reliable fellow than I am." He paused a second more. Was it possible that he found himself obliged to do so? "They said," he added, "they said they 'wanted a home.'" He heard a soft, little sound at his side,--a soft, emotional little sound. It came from Mrs. Sylvestre. She sat with her slender hands clasped upon her knee, and, as the little sound broke from her lips, she clasped them more closely. "Ah!" she said. "Ah! poor children!" Arbuthnot went on.