in
on the threshold of the room from which he had just departed.

Miss Wiggin never trusted anybody but herself to lock up the offices,
not even Mr. Tutt, and upon this particular evening she had made this an
excuse to linger on after the others had gone home and waylay him. Such
encounters were by no means infrequent and usually had a bearing upon
the ethical aspect of some proposed course of legal procedure on the
part of the firm.

Miss Minerva regarded Samuel Tutt as morally an abandoned and hopeless
creature. Mr. Ephraim Tutt she loved with a devotion rare among a sex
with whom devotion is happily a common trait, but there was a maternal
quality in her affection accounted for by the fact that although Mr.
Tutt was, to be sure, an old man in years, he had occasionally an
elfin, Puck-like perversity which was singularly boyish, at which times
she felt it obligatory for her own self-respect to call him to order.
Thus, whenever Tutt seemed to be incubating some evasion of law which
seemed more subtly plausible than ordinary she made it a point to call
it to Mr. Tutt's attention. Also, whenever, as in the present case, she
felt that by following the advice given by the junior member of the firm
a client was about to embark upon some dubious enterprise or
questionable course of conduct she endeavored to counteract his
influence by appealing to the head of the firm.

During the interview between Tutt and Payson Clifford the door had been
open and she had heard all of it; moreover, after Payson had gone away
Tutt had called her in and gone over the situation with her. And she
regarded Tutt's advice to his client,--not the purely legal aspect of
it, but the personal and persuasive part of it,--as an interference with
that young gentleman's freedom of conscience.

"Dear me!--I didn't know you were still here, Minerva!" exclaimed her
employer as she confronted him in the outer office. "Is anything
worrying you?"

"Not dangerously!" she replied with a smile. "And perhaps it's none of
my business--"

"My business is thy business, my dear!" he answered. "Without you Tutt &
Tutt would not be Tutt & Tutt. My junior partner may be the eyes and
legs of the firm and I may be some other portion of its anatomy, but you
are its heart and its conscience. Out with it! What rascality portends?
What bird of evil omen hovers above the offices of Tutt & Tutt? Spare
not an old man bowed down with the sorrows of this world! Has my shrewd