gave me notice, and
left for New York within two hours, letting it be known that she
expected her trunks to be sent after her.

"Gutter-snipes are not my specialty," was her parting word.

IV

There proved to be little difficulty in getting myself appointed Susan's
guardian. No one else wanted the child.

I promised the court to do my best for her; to treat her, in fact, as I
would my own flesh and blood. It might well be, I said, that before long
I should legally adopt her. In any event, if this for some unforeseen
reason proved inadvisable, I assured the court that Susan's future would
be provided for. The court benignly replied that, as it stood, I was
acting very handsomely in the matter; very handsomely; no doubt about
it. But there was a dim glimmer behind the juridic spectacles that
seemed to imply: "Handsomely, my dear sir, but whether wisely or no is
another question, which, as the official champion of widows and orphans,
I am not called upon to decide."

It was with a new sense of responsibility that I opened an account in
Susan's name with a local savings bank, and a week later added a short
but efficient codicil to my will.

In the meantime--but with alert suspicions--I interviewed several highly
recommended applicants for Miss Disbrow's deserted post; only to find
them wanting. Poor things! Combined, they could hardly have met all the
requirements, aesthetic and intellectual, which I had now set my heart
upon finding in one lone governess for Susan! It would have needed, by
this, a subtly modernized Hypatia to fulfill my ideal.

I might, of course, have waited for October to send Susan to a select
private school in the vicinage, patronized by the little daughters of
our more cautious families. It was, by neighborly consent, an excellent
school, where carefully sterilized cultures--physical, moral, mental,
and social--were painlessly injected into the blue blood streams of our
very nicest young girls. I say that I might have done so, but this is a
euphemism. On the one hand, I shrank from exposing Susan to possible
snubs; on the other, a little bird whispered that Miss Garnett,
principal of the school, would not care to expose her carefully
sterilized cultures to an alien contagion. Bearers of contagion--whether
physical, moral, mental, or social--were not sympathetic to Miss
Garnett's _clientele_. In Mrs. Parrot's iron phrase, there are places
for such.

Public schools, to wit! But in those lon