, compared with some of the boys. Any rate, she had not the
name of being so smart at school. Good little thing, too, and kind of
mothered the young ones.

Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him,
let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband
drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was
scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel. That night she talked
along time about their afternoon's adventure before she allowed him to go
to sleep. She said she must certainly see the child again; that they must
drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about herself.

"Albe't," she concluded; "I wish we had her to live with us. Yes, I do! I
wonder if we could get her to. You know I always did want to adopt a
baby."

"You neva said so," Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first
time, since the talk began.

"I didn't suppose you'd like it," said his wife.

"Well, she a'n't a baby. I guess you'd find you had your hands full,
takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up."

"I shouldn't be afraid any," the wife declared. "She has just twined
herself round my heat. I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes. I
know she's good."

"We'll see how you feel about it in the morning."

The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for
a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least. He seldom
talked, but there came times when he would not even listen. One of these
was the time after he had wound his watch. A minute later he had
undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as
effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were already
asleep.

II.

When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the
Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of
business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most
serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.
He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred
one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she
inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both
needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every
kind. She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their
furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which
they ha