nd's pockets that he might not feel
his manly pride injured, but she defeated her own ends by her very
solicitude. Jim Tenny began to reason that his wife saw his shame
and ignominious helplessness, else she would not have been so
anxious to cover it. The stoop of discouragement which Eva used to
fear for his shoulders did not come, but, instead, something
worse--the defiant set-back of recklessness. He took his wife's
earnings and despised himself. Whenever he paid a bill, he was sure
the men in the store said, the minute his back was turned, "It's his
wife's money that paid for that." He took to loafing on sunny
corners, and eying the passers-by with the blank impudence of regard
of those outside the current of life. When his wife passed by on her
way from the shop he nodded to her as if she were a stranger, and
presently followed her home at a distance. He would not be seen on
the street with her if he could avoid it. If by any chance when he
was standing on his corner of idleness his little girl came past, he
melted away imperceptibly. He could not bear it that the child
should see him standing there in that company of futility and openly
avowed inadequacy. The child was a keen-eyed, slender little girl,
resembling neither father nor mother, but looking rather like her
paternal grandmother, who was a fair, attenuated woman, with an
intelligence which had sharpened on herself for want of anything
more legitimate, and worn her out by the unnatural friction. The
little Amabel, for Eva had been romantic in the naming of her child,
was an old-fashioned-looking child in spite of Eva's careful
decoration of the little figure in the best childish finery which
she could muster.

Little Amabel was reading a child's book at another window. When
Mrs. Zelotes entered she eyed her with the sharpness and inscrutable
conclusions therefrom of a kitten, then turned a leaf in her book.

When Mrs. Zelotes had greeted her daughter-in-law and Eva, she
looked with disapproval at Amabel.

"When I was a little girl I should have been punished if I hadn't
got up and curtsied and said good-afternoon when company came in,"
she remarked, severely.

Amabel was not a favorite outside of her own family. People used to
stare aghast at her unexpected questions and demands delivered in a
shrill clarion as from some summit of childish wisdom, and they said
she was a queer child. She yielded always to command from utter
helplessness, but the why