It appeared that the rent was two dollars and a half a month.  That must be paid, at any rate.  Edith made a little calculation that on a flush average of ninety cents a week earned, and allowing so many cents for coal and so many cents for oil, the margin for bread and tea must be small for the month.  She usually bought three cents’ worth of tea at a time.

“It is kinder close,” said the old lady, with a smile.  “The worst is, my feet hurt me so I can’t stir out.  But the neighbors is real kind.  The little boy next room goes over to the shop and fetches my pantaloons and takes ’em back.  I can get along if it don’t come slack again.”

Sitting all day by that dim window, half the night stitching by a kerosene lamp; lying for six hours on that narrow couch!  How to account for this old soul’s Christian resignation and cheerfulness!  “For,” said the doctor, “she has seen better days; she has moved in high society; her husband, who died twenty years ago, was a policeman.  What the old lady is doing is fighting for her independence.  She has only one fear—­the almshouse.”

It was with such scenes as these in her eyes that Edith went to her dressing-room to make her toilet for the Henderson dinner.

V

It was the first time they had dined with the Hendersons.  It was Jack’s doings.  “Certainly, if you wish it,” Edith had said when the invitation came.  The unmentioned fact was that Jack had taken a little flier in Oshkosh, and a hint from Henderson one evening at the Union, when the venture looked squally, had let him out of a heavy loss into a small profit, and Jack felt grateful.

“I wonder how Henderson came to do it?” Jack was querying, as he and old Fairfax sipped their five-o’clock “Manhattan.”

“Oh, Henderson likes to do a good-natured thing still, now and then.  Do you know his wife?”

“No.  Who was she?”

“Why, old Eschelle’s daughter, Carmen; of course you wouldn’t know; that was ten years ago.  There was a good deal of talk about it at the time.”

“How?”

“Some said they’d been good friends before Mrs. Henderson’s death.”

“Then Carmen, as you call her, wasn’t the first?”

“No, but she was an easy second.  She’s a social climber; bound to get there from the start.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Devilish.  She’s a little thing.  I saw her once at Homburg, on the promenade with her mother.

“The kind of sweet blonde, I said to myself, that would mix a man up in a duel before he knew where he was.”

“She must be interesting.”

“She was always clever, and she knows enough to play a straight game and when to propitiate.  I’ll bet a five she tells Henderson whom to be good to when the chance offers.”

“Then her influence on him is good?”