“Well, Mrs. Langley, you see I found my friend Bessy very bad off,” she began. “It was all very sad because Joe her husband wasn’t long dead, and there was the baby, little Joe, Junior, and her chum Hazel sticking by her through everything and supposing she had lost her job, though they took her back again. I slept with Hazel Monday night and woke up towards morning and found her crying. It seemed that Bessy had enough laid up to bury her; but she’d been sick so long that Hazel had just had to break into it, what with medicine and the baby’s milk, and of course she had to have something to eat herself or she couldn’t have done for Bessy. And here it was almost gone, and Bessy didn’t know it had been touched, and was feeling so secure about it. You might not think anyone would mind, Mrs. Langley, but there’s something frightful in the idea of being buried by charity.” “I suppose so,” Mrs. Langley assented absently. “Charity down there doesn’t mean what it does with us, you see,--public charity isn’t like the charity of the Bible, you know.” Mrs. Langley nodded impatiently. “Well, I managed to get Hazel chirked up so that she went to sleep, and I lay staring at the smoky ceiling and wondering what to do. Then suddenly I had a hunch. And the very first thing in the morning I went down to Mason and Martin’s and talked with a woman in the hair goods I used to know that had first put me wise about such things. She gave me a tip and the people she sent me to offered me sixty-five dollars for my hair--the braid was almost a yard long and about as thick at one end as at the other, you know. Then I went back and told Hazel I could get sixty-five dollars for her at any moment. She thought it was a diamond ring or family jewels I could put in soak, which wouldn’t of course mean much at a time like that, and she cheered right up. And Bessy seemed to feel a change and to be really better, and we all talked about old times in the store and laughed a lot. But that was Bessy’s last day. She died in the night. In the morning I went down--and got the money.” Unconsciously the girl drew a deep sigh even as she forced a little plaintive smile. Mrs. Langley sighed yet more deeply. She wasn’t sufficiently practical to ask any of the obvious questions or to suggest the alternatives with which others were to confront and confound the girl even though they were quite futile now that the deed was done. “It was good of you, Anna,--it was a beautiful thing to do,” she acknowledged, “only I am afraid you will be sorry.”