at which he puffed
with that jealous comfort which comes after interruption. Colonel
Lamson, when he had given a friendly nod of greeting to the young
man, without removing his pipe from his mouth, leaned back his head
again, stretched his legs more luxuriously, and blew the smoke in
great wreaths around his face. This sitting-room of Lawyer Means's
was a scandal to the few matrons of Upham who had ever penetrated it.
"Don't look as if a woman had ever set foot in it," they said. The
ancient female relative of Lawyer Means who kept his house had not
been a notable house-keeper in her day, and her day was nearly past.
Moreover, she had small control over this particular room.

The great apartment, with the purple clouds of tobacco smoke, which
were settling against its low ceiling and in its far corners,
transfused with golden gleams of candles and rosy flashes of
fire-light, dingy as to wall-paper and carpet, with the dust of
months upon all shiny surfaces, seemed a very fortress of
bachelorhood wherein no woman might enter.

The lawyer's books in the tall cases were arranged in close ranks of
strictest order, as were also the neatly ticketed files of letters
and documents in the pigeon-holes of the great desk; otherwise the
whole room seemed fluttering and protruding out of its shadows with
loose ends of paper and corners of books. All the free lines in the
room were the tangents of irrelevancy and disorder.

The lawyer, puffing at his pipe, with eyes half closed, did not look
at Jerome, but his attitude was expectant.

Jerome stared at the blazing fire with a hesitating frown, then he
turned with sudden resolution to Means. "Can I see you alone a
minute?" he asked.

The Colonel rose, without a word, and lounged out of the room; when
the door had shut behind him, Jerome turned again to the lawyer. "I
want to know if you are willing to sell me two hundred and sixty-five
dollars' worth of your land," said he.

"Which land?"

"Your land on Graystone brook. I want one hundred and thirty-two
dollars and fifty cents' worth on each side."

"Why don't you make it even dollars, and what in thunder do you want
the land on two sides for?" asked the lawyer, in his dry voice,
threaded between his lips and pipe.

Jerome took an old wallet from his pocket. "Because two hundred and
sixty-five dollars is all the money I've got saved," he replied,
"and--"

"You haven't brought it here to close the bargain on the spot?"
in