“I may as well be frank with you, Miss Hayden, and make it clear from the outset that involved with this claim is one for a corresponding amount based on the personal injuries which Mr. Uhlan has received, injuries which, so far as medical science seems able to determine, give every promise of proving permanent. And there is a further claim of one thousand dollars for costs and medical services, which establishes the total claims at a round figure of twenty-five thousand dollars.” Teddie, who had sat watching him with rather solemn eyes, somewhat startled the sedate William Shotwell by a brief but scornful laugh. “So that was rather an expensive thump on the nose, wasn’t it?” she observed, with the last of her meekness taking wing. For it began to dawn on her, ignorant as she was of the meaning of money, just what they were trying to do to her. “I am not prepared to disagree with you,” admitted her enemy, not without acerbity. “And did he tell you just what he was doing when he got that thump on the nose?” demanded Teddie, with slowly rising indignation. “He was doing nothing, apparently, which demanded his—his being maimed for life,” the man of the law responded with dignity. “He wasn’t maimed for life,” declared Teddie, with the last of her desolation gone, “but he got exactly what he deserved.” “That, of course, is a matter not for us but for the courts to decide,” remarked William Shotwell, with a lugubrious shake of the head. “Then what’s the use of us talking about it now?” demanded Teddie, with a glance at her unfinished sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight. “It was merely to save you pain,” remarked her benefactor as he rose from his chair. “It seems rather an expensive anesthetic,” observed Teddie, “at twenty-five thousand dollars a whiff!” “Am I to understand, then, that you intend to contest this claim?” demanded the man of law, taking up his hat. Teddie swung about on him, with a little flush of anger on her magnolia-white cheeks. Then, for once in her life, discretion put a hand on the sleeve of impulse. About her rebellious young body she felt the phantasmal jaws of her Uncle Charlton’s waffle-iron coming closer and closer together. “I must decline to enter into any discussion of the matter until I have seen my attorney,” she said with dignity. It was what was usually said, she remembered, at all such junctures. “Then might I inquire just who your attorney is?” inquired William Shotwell. And Teddie’s dignity, for a moment, betrayed serious evidences of collapsing. She had no attorney. She didn’t even know of any attorney. But she couldn’t afford to betray her isolation. “You will hear from him in due time,” she said with what was plainly a valedictory smile, as she preceded her persecutor to the door. But her persecutor exhibited no signs of taking his departure. Instead, he stepped closer, seeming to suffer some mysterious inward deliquescence as he studied her with a sympathetic if slightly watery eye.