leaves a family. Now suppose your father had given all his
property to charity, would you feel obliged to impoverish yourself for
the benefit of a Home for Aged Mariners?"

"Really," replied the bewildered Payson. "I don't know. But anyway I'm
satisfied you're quite right and I'm tremendously obliged. However," he
added musingly, "I'd rather like to know who this Sadie Burch is!"

"If I were you, young man," advised the lawyer sagely, "I wouldn't try
to find out!"

Mr. Payson Clifford left the offices of Tutt & Tutt more recalcitrant
against fate and irritated with his family than when he had entered
them. He had found himself much less comfortably provided for than he
had expected, and the unpleasant impression created by the supposed
paternal relatives at his father's funeral had been heightened by the
letter regarding Sadie Burch. There was something even more offensively
plebeian about them than that of the vulgar Weng. It would have been bad
enough to have had to consider the propriety of paying over a large sum
to a lady calling herself by an elegant or at least debonair name like
Claire Desmond or Lillian Lamar,--but Sadie! And Burch! Ye gods! It was
ignoble, sordid. That was a fine discovery to make about one's father!

As he walked slowly up Fifth Avenue to his hotel it must be confessed
that his reflections upon that father's memory were far from filial. He
told himself that he'd always suspected something furtive about the old
man, who must have been under most unusual and extraordinary obligations
to a woman to whom he desired his son to turn over twenty-five thousand
dollars. It was pretty nearly half of his entire fortune! Would cut down
his income from around four thousand to nearly two thousand! The more he
pondered upon the matter the more the lawyer's arguments seemed
absolutely convincing. Lawyers knew more than other people about such
things, anyway. You paid them for their advice, and he would doubtless
have to pay Tutt for his upon this very subject, which, somehow, seemed
to be rather a good reason for following it. No, he would dismiss Sadie
Burch and the letter forever from his mind. Very likely she was dead
anyway, whoever she was. Four thousand a year! Not a bad income for a
bachelor!

And while our innocent young Launcelot trudging uptown hardened his
heart against Sadie Burch, by chance that lady figured in a short but
poignant conversation between Mr. Ephraim Tutt and Miss Minerva Wigg