y from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and
then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau. He sighed
profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.

V.

The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina's mother decided that
she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while. It was established that
she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she
was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to
carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when
she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse
or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell
about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or
left.

She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the
discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with
grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself
who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it
was Clementina. He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in
her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it
was not Mrs. Atwell. She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have
his joke as if it were not one. But one day when the clerk called her
Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he
had taken a liberty which he must not repeat. He was a young man who much
preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort, and
after he had endured Clementina's gaze as long as he could, he said,
"Perhaps you don't allow anybody but the chef to call you that?"

She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her
for him, and went away.

It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the
young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to
look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a
girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and
he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying
to bully her.

He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college
student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially. He had
him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of little
private room for him, and talked with him at such hours