n his return from these festivities he was smellier and
stupider than ever,--that was all his small niece realized. He never did
any work, so far as she was aware, but as his wife had accepted the fact
and no longer discussed it in public, the little girl did not think much
about his idleness. That might be the man-habit generally.

Adelle was in her thirteenth year and in the last grade of her school
when she first began to notice the presence of some strangers in the
Church Street house. She was not an observant child, and there was such
a succession of "roomers" in the house that a stranger's face aroused
little curiosity. But these men were better dressed than any roomers and
talked in tones of authority and conscious position. They held long
conversations with her uncle and aunt in the dining-room behind closed
doors, and once she saw a bundle of papers spread out upon the table.
These days her uncle and aunt talked much about titles, mortgages,
deeds, and other matters she did not understand nor ask about. But she
felt that something important was astir in the Church Street house, as a
child realizes vaguely such movements outside its own sphere. Once one
of the men, who was putting on his silk hat in the hall and preparing to
leave the house, inquired, "Is that the girl?" To which question her
uncle and aunt answered briefly, "Yes." The tone of the stranger was
exactly as if he had asked, "Is that the bundle of clothes we were
talking about?"

Something was afoot of momentous importance to Adelle, as we shall
shortly discover. Fate once more in the person of a feeble Clark was
about to play her an unkind trick. For John, reduced to complete
incompetence by his life and his habit of drink, pestered by the
accumulating claims upon Clark's Field, had consented to an
"arrangement" that certain capitalists had presented to him through
their lawyers. They had urged him to sell to them all the remaining
equity that he held in the property, giving a quitclaim deed for himself
and his wife and for Adelle, whose legal guardian he was. The purchasers
would assume all the liabilities of the encumbered Field, the risk of
title, and for this complete surrender of the family interest in Clark's
Field, John Clark was to receive the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars
all told in cash. It was five times what his father had been anxious to
get for the same property, as the lawyers pointed out, when John in the
beginning talked la