"There's a young man recently employed that I have not been at all
pleased with. He leaves to-morrow."

"Ah!" said the visitor. "Not the person I met going out of the area
way, with the dogs as I came in?"

She answered affirmatively.

"H--mn!" He paused. "But tell me why you have not been pleased with him,
and, in brief, all the circumstances of his coming here."

Miss Van Rolsen did so in a voice she strove to make patient although
she could not disguise its tremulousness, or the feverish anxiety that
consumed her. She related the most trivial details, seeming
irrelevances, but the visitor did not interrupt her. Instead, he studied
carefully her face, pinched and worn; the angular figure, slightly bent;
the fingers, nervously clasping and unclasping as she spoke. He watched
her through habit; and still forbore speaking, even when she referred to
the escape of her canine favorite from his caretaker and how the dog had
later been returned, though the listener's eyes had, at this point,
dilated slightly.

"After his carelessness in this matter, he seemed to want to get away
from the house at once," observed Miss Van Rolsen, "without availing
himself of the two-weeks' notice I had agreed to give him."

The visitor relapsed into his chair; an ironical light appeared in his
eyes.

"Perhaps," added Miss Van Rolsen, "you attach no significance to the