eir credit and benefit to
their fellow-beings. But, of course, one person's conscience isn't
another person's, and we've each got to judge for ourselves, and be
judged afterwards!"

Now Willy leaned forward in her chair, and her eyes glistened. As her
body grew colder, so did her temper grow warmer.

"If it's Mrs. Cliff you're thinkin' about, Nancy Shott," said she, "I'll
just tell you that you're as wrong as you can be! There isn't a more
generous and a kinder person in this whole town than Mrs. Cliff is, and
she isn't only that way to-day, but she's always been so, whether she's
had little or whether she's had much!"

"What did she ever do, I'd like to know!" said Miss Nancy. "She's lined
her own nest pretty well, but what's she ever done for anybody else--"

"Now, Nancy Shott," said Willy, "you know she's been doin' for other
people all her life whenever she could! She's done for you more than
once, as I happen to know,--and she's done for other neighbors and
friends. And, more than that, she's gone abroad to do good, and that's
more than anybody else in this town's done, as I know of!"

"She didn't go to South America to do good to anybody but herself,"
coolly remarked the visitor.

"I'm not thinking of that!" said Willy. "She went there on business, as
everybody knows! But you remember well enough when she was in the city,
and I was with her, when the dreadful cholera times came on! Everybody
said that there wasn't a person who worked harder and did more for the
poor people who were brought to the hospital than Sarah did.

"She worked for them night and day; before they were dead and after they
were dead! I did what I could, but it wasn't nothin' to what she did!
Both of us had been buyin' things, and makin' them up for ourselves, for
cotton and linen goods was so cheap then. If it hadn't been for the
troubles which came on, we'd had enough to last us for years! But Sarah
Cliff isn't the kind of woman to keep things for herself when they're
wanted by others, and when she had given everything that she had to
those poor creatures at the hospitals, she took my things without as
much as takin' the trouble to ask me, for in times like that she isn't
the woman to hesitate when she thinks she's doin' what ought to be done,
and at one time, in that hospital, there was eleven corpses in my
night-gowns!"

"Horrible!" exclaimed Miss Shott, rising to her feet. "It would have
killed me to think of such a thing as that!