he gracious
dispenser of patronage. However, a great many people shared Sharlee's
opinion of Charles Gardiner West. One of them walked into his office at
that very moment, also petitioning for something, and West received him
with just that same unaffected pleasantness of manner which everybody
found so agreeable. But this one's business, as it happened, completely
knocked from Mr. West's head the matter of Mr. Queed. In fact, he never
gave it another thought. The following night he went to New York with a
little party of friends, chiefly on pleasure bent; and, having no
particularly frugal mind, permitted himself a very happy day or so in
the metropolis. Hence it happened that Sharlee, learning from her aunt
that no Post directors had called forcing remunerative work on Mr.
Queed, made it convenient, about five days after the telephone
conversation, to meet Mr. West upon the street, quite by accident. Any
girl can tell you how it is done.

"Oh, by the way," she said in the most casual way, "shall I send my
little Doctor Queed to call upon you some day?"

West was agreeably contrite; abused himself for a shiftless lackwit who
was slated for an unwept grave; promised to call that very day; and,
making a memorandum the instant he got back to the office, this time did
not fail to keep his word.

Not that Mr. Queed had been inconvenienced by the little delay. The
minute after his landlady's agent left him, he had become immersed in
that great work of his, and there by day and night, he had remained.
Having turned over to the agent the full responsibility for finding work
for him, he no longer had to bother his head about it. The whole matter
dropped gloriously from his mind; he read, wrote, and avoided practicing
sociology with tremendous industry; and thus he might have gone on for
no one knows how long had there not, at five o'clock on the fifth day,
come a knock upon his door.

"Well?" he called, annoyed.

Emma came in with a card. The name, at which the young man barely
glanced, conveyed nothing to him.

"Well? What does he want?"

Emma did not know.

"Oh!" said Mr. Queed, irritably--"tell him to come up, if he must."

The _Post_ director came up--two flights; he knocked; was curtly bidden
to enter; did so.

He stepped into one of the smallest rooms he had ever seen in his life;
about nine by five-and-a-half, he thought. A tiny single bed ran along
one side of it; jammed against the foot of the bed was a ti