young men. This is your aunt's, isn't it?"

"No, no--next to the corner over there. O heavens! Look--_look!_"

West looked. Up the front steps of Miss Weyland's Aunt Jennie's a man
was going, a smallish man in a suit of dusty clothes, who limped
as he walked. The electric light at the corner illumined him
perfectly--glinted upon the spectacles, touched up the stout volume in
the coat-pocket, beat full upon the swaybacked derby, whereon its owner
had sat what time Charlotte Lee Weyland apologized for the gaucherie of
Behemoth. And as they watched, this man pushed open Aunt Jennie's front
door, with never so much as a glance at the door-bell, and stepped as of
right inside.

Involuntarily West and Miss Weyland had halted; and now they stared at
each other with a kind of wild surmise which rapidly yielded to
ludicrous certainty. West broke into a laugh.

"Well, do you think you'll have the nerve to fire _him_?"




II

_Mrs. Paynter's Boarding-House: which was not founded as an
Eleemosynary Institution._


There was something of a flutter among the gathered boarders when Miss