s turned to meet his father's. Carroll did not speak,
but he raised his hand and pointed to the hall with an upward motion
for the stairs, and Eddy went, with a faint whimper of remonstrance.
The scolding woman saw the little, retreating figure, and directly
the torrent of her vituperation was turned into a new course.

"You, you, you!" she proclaimed; "dressin' your boy up in fine
clothes, while mine children have went in rags since you have came to
Banbridge! You, you, you! gettin' all my man's money, and dressin' up
your boy in clothes that I haf paid for! You, you, you!"

But Minna Eddy had unwittingly furnished the right key-note for a
whole chorus. Madame Griggs, who had been rocking jerkily in a small,
red-plush chair which squeaked faintly, sprang up, and left it still
rocking and squeaking.

"Yes," said she, "yes, that is so. Look at the way the whole family
dress, at other people's expense!"

She was hysterical still, yet she had not lost her sense of the
gentility of self-restraint. That would come later. Her face worked
convulsively, red spots were on her thin cheeks, but there was still
an ingratiating, somewhat servile, tone in her voice, and she looked
scornfully at Minna Eddy. Then J. Rosenstein, who kept the principal
dry-goods store in Banbridge, bore his testimony. His grievances were
small, but none the less vital. His business dealings with the
Carrolls had been limited to sundry spools of thread and kitchen
towellings and buttons, but they were as lead in his estimate of
wrong, although he had a grave, introspective expression, out of
proportion to the seeming triviality of the matter in his mind. He
held in one long hand a slip of paper, and eyed Carroll with
dignified accusation.

"This is the fifth bill I have made out," he remarked, and he raised
his voice to the pitch of his brethren of the Bowery when they hawk
in the street. "The fifth bill I have made out, and it is only for
one dollar and fifty-three cents, and I am poor."

His intellectual Semitic face took on an ignoble expression of one
who squeezes justice to petty ends for his own deserts. His whine
penetrated the rising chorus of the other voices, even of the
butcher, who was a countryman of his own, and who said something with
dolorous fervor about the bill for meat which had been running for
six weeks, and not a dollar paid. He was of a more common sort, and
rendered a trifle indifferent by a recent visit to a beer-saloon. H