the debt as money seemed to be needed.

When Clem's recovery was assured and I urged Miss Caroline to go to
Little Miss, she asked me bluntly what sum I had owed Clem. I felt
obliged to confess that it was not more than two hundred dollars.

This must have surprised Miss Caroline as much as it rejoiced her, for
she took up the matter with Clem, and in so clumsy a fashion that he,
perhaps owing to his enfeebled condition, witlessly made a confession at
variance with mine, and with an effect of candor that moved his
questioner to take his word rather than that of an officer and a
gentleman. Of course this was not at all like Clem. In referring to sums
of money due him he had ever been wont to chant them with a bard-like
inflation that recognized only sums of a vague but immense rotundity. I
had never known him to be thus prosaic, and I suspected that Miss
Caroline had, in a sudden impulse of doubt, terrified him into being so
brutally explicit.

Whence fell a coldness between Miss Caroline and me, for the discrepancy
between Clem's confession and mine was not slight. Even my mutterings
about interest having accumulated were put down as the desperate
resource of embarrassment. Miss Caroline did not even dignify them with
her notice, and the coldness increased.

Yet, while it was a true coldness, it was distinguished by a certain
alien quality of warmth, for Miss Caroline, though now on guard against
any mere vulgar benevolence of mine, talked to me frankly, as she had
never done before, about her situation.

First, it was impossible to think of going to her daughter. There were
debts in the town; Clem would be unable to work for many weeks; and not
only had Little Miss's contribution from her small wage now failed, but
she herself had incurred debts and would be without money to pay them.

My neighbor depicted the gravity of this situation with a spirit that
taxed my powers of admiration,--powers not slight, I may explain; for
had they not already been developed beyond the ordinary by this same
woman? Not even was she downcast in my presence. In fine, she was
superbly Miss Caroline to me. If I saw that to herself she was an
ill-fated old woman, perversely surviving a wreck with which she should
have gone down, alone in a land that seemed unkind because it did not
understand, and in desperate straits for the commonest stuff in the
world,--why, that was no matter to be opened between us. We affected
with mild philosop