Aileen, although by no means demonstrative, could not refrain from
laying her head on her friend's shoulder as she said, "Well then, dear
Laura, we are beggars! Dear papa has failed in business, and we have
not a penny in the world!"

Miss Pritty was not nearly so horrified as she had anticipated being.
Poor thing, she was so frequently in the condition of being without a
penny that she had become accustomed to it. Her face, however,
expressed deep sympathy, and her words corresponded therewith.

"How did it happen?" she asked, at the close of a torrent of condolence.

"Indeed I don't know," replied Aileen, looking up with a smile as she
brushed away the two tears which the mention of their distress had
forced into her eyes. "Papa says it was owing to the mismanagement of a
head clerk and the dishonesty of a foreign agent, but whatever the
cause, the fact is that we are ruined. Of course that means, I suppose,
that we shall have no more than enough to procure the bare necessaries
of life, and shall now, alas! Know experimentally what it is to be
poor."

Miss Pritty, when in possession of "enough to procure the bare
necessaries of life," had been wont to consider herself rich, but her
powers of sympathy were great. She scorned petty details, and poured
herself out on her _poor_ friend as a true comforter--counselled
resignation as a matter of course, but suggested such a series of bright
impossibilities for the future as caused Aileen to laugh, despite her
grief.

In the midst of one of these bursts of hilarity Mr Hazlit entered the
room. The sound seemed to grate on his feelings, for he frowned as he
walked, in an absent mood, up to a glass case full of gaudy birds, and
turned his back to it under the impression, apparently, that it was a
fire.

"Aileen," he said, jingling some loose coin in his pocket with one hand,
while with the other he twisted the links of a massive gold chain, "your
mirth is ill-timed. I am sorry, Miss Pritty, to have to announce to
you, so soon after your arrival, that I am a beggar."

As he spoke he drew himself up to his full height, and looked, on the
whole, like an over-fed, highly ornamented, and well-to-do beggar.

"Yes," he said, repeating the word with emphasis as if he were rather
proud of it, "a beggar. I have not a possession in the world save the
clothes on my back, which common decency demands that my creditors
should allow to remain there. Now, I have all my life