"It
would not hurt them Carroll ladies, that young lady, nor her mother,
nor her aunt, if they was to take hold, and do the housework them own
selves, instead of keeping a girl, who they do not never pay."

"Oh, dear! Do you know that?"

"Indeed I do know that! Ed, he told me. He had it straight from them
Hungarians who live in the house back of his married sister's. The
Carroll girl, she goes there, and she told them, and them told Ed's
sister."

"Perhaps she has had some of her wages. You don't mean she has not
been paid at all?" Mrs. Anderson said.

"I mean not at all," the maid said, firmly. "That girl that works for
them Carrolls has not been paid, not at all."

"Why does she remain there, then?"

"She would have went a long time ago if she not been afraid, lest, if
she had went, it would have come about that she would have lost all
she was going to lose as well as that which she had lost before,"
replied the girl, and Mrs. Anderson, being accustomed to her method
of expression, understood.

"It is dreadful," she said.

"They say he has about ruined a great many of the people in Banbridge
who have trusted them," said the maid, with a sly, keen glance at her
mistress. She had heard that Mr. Anderson was one of the losers, and
she wondered.

"They have paid my son promptly, I believe," said Mrs. Anderson,
although a little reluctantly. She always disliked alluding to the
store to her maid, much more so than towards her equals. But that the
maid misunderstood. She often told her beau that Mrs. Anderson was
not a bit set up nor proud-feeling, if her son _did_ have a store.
Therefore, to-night she understood humility instead of pride from her
mistress's tone, and looked at her admiringly as she daintily
polished the delicate pink-and-gold cups.

"I am very glad, indeed, that Mr. Randolph has not lost nothing
through them," she replied.

"No, he has not," Mrs. Anderson repeated. "I dare say it is all
exaggerated. The young lady who was here to-night seems like a very
sweet girl."

Mrs. Anderson said that from a beautiful sense of loyalty and
justice, while in her mind's eye she saw her beloved son walking
along through the early night with the young lady on his arm, and
perhaps falling desperately in love, even at this date, and beginning
to think of matrimony with a member of a family about which such
tales were told in Banbridge.

But the harm had been done long before she had dreamed of it, and her