n't be
ashamed before the other girls, and I don't want Cynthia Lennox
thinking she ain't well enough dressed, and we ought to have let her
do it. As for being beholden to her for Ellen's clothes, I won't."

"I rather guess not," said Andrew, but he was sick at heart. Only
that afternoon the man from whom he had borrowed the money to buy
Ellen's watch and chain had asked him for it. He had not a cent in
advance for his weekly pay; he could not see where the money for
Ellen's clothes was coming from. It was long since the "Golden Hope"
had been quoted in the stock-list, but the next morning Andrew
purchased a morning paper. He had stopped taking one regularly. He
put on his spectacles, and spread out the paper in his shaking
hands, and scrutinized the stock-list eagerly, but he could not find
what he wanted. The "Golden Hope" had long since dropped to a still
level below all record of fluctuations. A young man passing to his
place at the bench looked over his shoulder. "Counting up your
dividends, Brewster?" he asked, with a grin.

Andrew folded up the paper gloomily and made no reply.

"Irish dividends, maybe," said the man, with a chuckle at his own
wit, and a backward roll of a facetious eye.

"Oh, shut up, you're too smart to live," said the man who stood next
at the bench. He was a young fellow who had been a school-mate of
Ellen in the grammar-school. He had left to go to work when she had
entered the high-school. His name was Dixon. He was wiry and alert,
with a restless sparkle of bright eyes in a grimy face, and he cut
the leather with lightning-like rapidity. Dixon had always thought
Ellen the most beautiful girl in Rowe. He looked after Andrew with a
sharp pain of sympathy when he went away with the roll of newspaper
sticking out of his pocket.

"Poor old chap," he said to the facetious man, thrusting his face
angrily towards him. "He has had a devil of a time since he begun to
grow old. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Wait till you begin
to drop behind. It's what's bound to come to the whole boiling of
us."

"Mind your jaw," said the first man, with a scowl.

"You'd better mind yours," said Dixon, slashing furiously at the
leather.

That noon Dixon offered Andrew, shamefacedly, taking him aside lest
the other men see, a piece of pie of a superior sort which his
mother had put into his dinner bag, but Andrew thanked him kindly
and refused it. He could eat nothing whatever that noon. He kept
th