finally threw down her scissors with a gesture of despair.
She was too nervous to do any more. The wind, her anxious thoughts, the
exacting task of cutting a suit from an inadequate amount of cloth, was
a combination that proved to be too much. She glanced at the clock on
the bookcase--only three o'clock! Actually there seemed forty-eight
hours in days like this. She stood uncertainly for a moment, then
determination settled on her tense worried face. Why put it off any
longer? It must be done sooner or later--she was sure of that. Besides,
nothing ever was as hard as one anticipates. This was a cheering
thought, and the lines in Mrs. Toomey's forehead smoothed out as she
stood before the mirror buttoning her coat and tying a veil over her
head.

It took no small amount of physical courage for a person of Mrs.
Toomey's frailty to face such a gale. But with her thin lips in a
determined line and her gaze straight ahead, she managed, by tacking
judiciously and stopping at intervals to clasp a telephone pole while
she recovered her breath, to reach the iron fence imported from Omaha
which gave such a look of exclusiveness to the Pantins' residence.

Mr. Pantin thought he heard the gate slam and peered out through the
dead wild-cucumber vines which framed the bow window to see Mrs. Toomey
coming up the only cement walk in Prouty. He immediately thrust his
stockinged feet back in his comfortable Romeos preparatory to opening
the door, but before he got up he stooped and looked again, searchingly.
Mr. Pantin was endowed with a gift that was like a sixth sense, which
enabled him to detect a borrower as far as his excellent eyesight could
see one. This intuition, combined with experience, had been developed to
the point of uncanniness. No borrower, however adroit, could hope to
conceal from Mr. Pantin for a single instant the real purpose of his
call by irrelevant talk and solicitous inquiries about his health. In
the present instance it did not require great acumen to guess that
something urgent had brought Mrs. Toomey out on a day like this, nor any
particular keenness to detect the signs of agitation which Mr. Pantin
noted in his swift glance. She was coming to borrow--he was as sure of
that as though she already had asked, and if any further confirmation
were needed, her unnatural gayety when he admitted her and the
shortness of her breath finished that.

It availed Mrs. Toomey nothing to tell herself that Mrs. Pantin wa