their hands; and they enjoyed the impersonality which
enables us to judge and sentence one another in this world, and to do
justice, as we say. It is true that Pinney, having seen Northwick's
home, and faced his elderly, invalid daughter, was moved to use him with
a leniency which he would not otherwise have felt. He recognized a merit
in this forbearance of his, and once, towards the end of his work, when
he was taking a little rest, he said: "Reporters get as much abuse as
plumbers; but if people only knew what we kept back, perhaps they would
sing a different tune. Of course, it's a temptation to describe his
daughter, poor old thing, and give the interview in full, but I don't
quite like to. I've got to cut it down to the fact that she evidently
hadn't the least idea of the defalcation, or why he was on the way to
Canada. Might work a little pathos in with that, but I guess I mustn't!"

His wife pushed the manuscript away from her, and flung down the pen.
"Well, Ren, if you go on talking in that way, you'll take the pleasure
out of it for _me_; I can tell you that much. If I get to thinking of
his family, I can't help you any more."

"Pshaw!" said Pinney. "The facts have got to come out, any way, and I
guess they won't be handled half as mercifully anywhere else as I shall
handle 'em." He put his arms round her, and pulled her tight up to him.
"Your tender-heartedness is going to be the ruin of me yet, Hat. If it
hadn't been for thinking how you'd have felt, I should gone right up to
Wellwater, and looked up that accident, myself, on the ground. But I
knew you'd go all to pieces, if I wasn't back at the time I said, and so
I didn't go."

"Oh, what a story!" said the young wife, fondly, with her adoring eyes
upon him. "I shouldn't have cared, I guess, if you'd never come back."

"Shouldn't you? How many per cent of that am I going to believe?" he
asked, and he drew her to him again in a rapture with her pretty looks,
and the love he saw in them.

Pinney was a handsome little fellow himself, with a gay give-and-take
air that had always served him well with women, and that, as his wife
often told him, had made her determine to have him the first time she
saw him.

This was at the opening of the Promontory House, two summers before,
when Pinney was assigned to write the affair up for the _Events_. She
had got her first place as operator in the new hotel; and he brought in
a despatch for her to send to Boston just