t have a thin
dime left when my lawyers finished with me."

"I've got plenty of money--and it's yours. And the money you get from me
will be honest money, too; the interest on loans made in my pawnshop
is honest all right. It'll be better, anyhow, for you to be out in the
world a few days, getting used to it, before you take a job."

"Why, grandmother!"

The explanation seemed bald and inadequate, but Larry did not know what
else to say, he was so taken aback. The Duchess, as far as he had been
able to see, had never shown much interest in him. And now, unless he
was mistaken, there was something very much like emotion quavering in
her thin voice and shining in her old eyes.

"I don't interfere with what people want to do," she continued--"but,
Larry, I'm glad you've decided to go straight."

And then the Duchess went on to make the longest speech that any living
person had ever heard issue from her lips, and to reveal more than
had yet been heard of that unmysterious mystery which lived within her
shriveled, misshapen figure:

"That's what made me interested in Joe Ellison's story--his wanting to
get his child clear of the life he was living; though I didn't know he
had any such ideas till you told me. Larry, I couldn't get out of this
life myself; I was part of it, I belonged to it. But I felt the same as
Joe Ellison, and over forty years ago I got your mother out of it, and
your mother never came back to it. I did that much. After she died it
made me sick when you, all I've got left, began to go crooked. But I had
no control over you; I couldn't do anything. So I'm glad that at last
you're going to go straight. I'm glad, Larry!"

The emotion that had given her voice a strange and increasing vibrance,
was suddenly brought under control or snuffed out; and she added in her
usual thin, mechanical tone: "The money will be ready for you in the
morning."

Startled and embarrassed by this outbreak of things long hidden beneath
the dust in the secret chambers of her being, and wishing to avoid
the further embarrassment of thanks, the Duchess turned quickly and
awkwardly back to her desk, and her bent old body became fixed above
her figures. In a moment the ever-alert Hunt had out the little block
of drawing-paper he always carried in a pocket, and with swift, eager
strokes he was sketching the outline of that bent, shrunken shape that
had subsided so swiftly from emotion to the commonplace.

Larry gazed at the Duc