out:

"That you, Debby? Couldn't you stand it any longer? Neither could I. That girl is a peach to look at, but she can't sing for sour apples; and as for brains, she's a nut, a pure pecan! I guess I'm too old or not old enough to be satisfied with staring at a pretty hide on a pretty frame. Which way you going? I'll walk along with you if you don't mind."

If she didn't mind! Would Lazarus object if Dives sat down on the floor beside him and brought along his trencher?

Debby was so bewildered that the sidewalk reeled beneath her intoxicated feet. She stumbled till Meldrum took her hand and set it in the crook of his arm, and she trotted along as meek as Tobias with the angel.

All, all too soon they reached her house. But he paused at the gate. She dared not invite him even to the porch.

If her mother heard a man's voice there she would probably open the window upstairs and shriek: "Murder! Thieves! Help!"

So Debby waited at the gate while the almost invisible Meldrum chattered on. She was so afraid that he would go every next minute that she hardly heard what he said. But he had only a hotel room ahead of him. He was used to late hours. He was in a mood for talk. The paralyzed Debby was a perfect listener, and in that intense dark she was as beautiful as Cleopatra would have been.

To her he was solely a voice, a voice of strange cynicisms, yet of strange comfort to her. He was laughing at the people she held in awe. "This town's a joke to me," he said. "It's a side-show full of freaks." And he mocked the great folk of the village as if they were yokels. He laughed at their customs. He ridiculed many, many things that Debby had believed and suffered from believing. He ridiculed married people and marriage from the superior heights of one who could have married many and had rejected all. It was strangely pleasant hearing to her who had observed marriage from the humble depths of one whom all had rejected. He talked till he heard the town clock whine eleven times, then he said:

"Good Lord! I didn't know it was so late. I must have talked your arm off, Debby. I don't get these moods often. It takes a mighty good listener to loosen me up. Good night! Don't let any of these fellows bunco you into marrying 'em. There's nothing in it, Debby. Take it from me. Good night."

She felt rather than saw that he lifted his hat. She felt again his big hand enveloping hers, and she answered its squeeze with a desperate little clench of her own.

He left her wonderfully uplifted. Now she felt less an exile from marriage than a rebel. She almost convinced herself that she had kept out of matrimony because she was too good for it. The solitary cell of her bed was a queenly dais when she crept into it. She dreamed that General Kitchener asked for her hand and she refused it.

CHAPTER V

Meldrum's cynicisms had been strangely opportune to the strangely opportune to the despondent old maid. He unwittingly helped her over a deep ditch and got her past a bad night.

But when she woke, the next morning was but the same old resumption of the same old day. Poverty, loneliness, and the inanity of a manless household were again her portion. The face she washed explained to her why she was not sought after by the men. The hair she combed and wadded on her cranium clouded with no romance even in her own eyes. She realized that she was not loved for the simple reason that she was not lovely. She had never been a rose, and men did not pluck dog-fennel to wear. And the camomile could never become a marguerite by wishing to be one.

Debby haled her awkward self out of her humble cot, out of her coarse and frilless nightgown, into her matter-of-fact clothes, and slumped down to a chill, bare kitchen. There she made a fire in a cold stove, that she might warm up oatmeal and fry eggs and petrify a few slices of bread into a scratchy toast.

Not hearing her mother's slippers flap and shuffle on the stairs as usual, she climbed again to learn the cause. She found her mother filled with rheumatism and bad news. A letter had come the day before, and she had concealed it from Deborah so that the child might have a nice time at the party; and did she have a nice time, and who was there? But that could wait, for never was there such news as she had now, and there was never any let-up in bad luck, and them with no man to lean on or turn to.

When Deborah finally pried the letter from the poor old talons she found an announcement that the A.G.&St.P.Ry. would pass its dividend this year. To the Larrabees the A.G.&St.P. had always been the most substantial thing in the world next to the Presbyterian Church.

Deborah's father had said that his death-bed was cheered by the fact that he had left his widow and his child several shares of that soulful corporation's stock. He called it the "Angel Gabriel & St. Peter Railway." The dividend was as sure as flowers in June. It had never failed, and the Larrabee women always spent it before it was paid. They had pledged it this year.

If they had followed the stock-market, of which they had hardly heard, they would have known that the railroad's shares had fallen from 203 to 51 in two years and that the concern was curving gracefully toward a receivership. The two women breakfasted that morning on cold dismay and hot flashes of terror. The few hundred dollars that had come to them like semi-annual manna and quails would not drop down this year, perhaps not next year, or ever again. Their creditors would probably throw them into the town jail. The poorhouse would be a paradise.

In her distraction Debby had an impulse to consult Newt Meldrum. She hurried to Shillaber's Bazar, hoping he might be there. Asaph met her himself and told her that Newt had gone back to New York on an early train. Debby broke down and told of her plight. She supposed that she would have to go to work at once somewhere. But what could she do?

Asaph was feeling amiable; he had won a reprieve from Meldrum and had made it up with his wife in private for the public quarrel. His heart melted at the thought of helping poor old Dubby Debby, whom everybody was fond of in a hatefully unflattering way. He had helped other gentlewomen in distress, and now he dumfounded Debby by saying, "Why don't you clerk here, Debby?"

"Why, I couldn't clerk in a store!" she gasped, terrified. "I don't know the least thing about it."

"You'd soon learn the stock, and the prices are all marked in plain letters that you can memorize easy. You've got a lot of friends, and we give a commission on all the sales over a certain amount. Better try it."

Debby felt now, for the first time, all the sweet panic that most women undergo with their first proposal. This offer of the job of saleswoman was as near as Debby had come to being offered the job of helpmeet. She even murmured, "This is so sudden," and, "I'll have to ask mama." It was an epoch-making decision, a terrible leap from the stagnant pool of the Larrabee cottage to the seething maelstrom of Shillaber's Bazar. She went home to her mother with the thrilling, the glorious news that henceforth she could acquire all of five dollars a week by merely being present at Shillaber's for twelve hours or so a day,