oney--for a
very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven't
you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do--"

Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: "Why, Nat Emery! You have
yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter--and you tell me
that costs so much that you can't stop working when there's--"

"Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!" The Judge made a weary gesture
of dismissal. "You're always talking like a child, or a preacher, about
how things _might_ be! You know what an establishment like ours costs to
keep up, as well as I do. I'm in it--we've sort of gradually got in
deeper and deeper, the way folks do--and it would take a thousand times
more out of me to break loose than to go on. You're an old fuss, anyhow.
I'm all right. Only for the Lord's sake leave me quiet now."

The doctor shivered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how,
to his physician's eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend
gleamed lividly from his white face.

Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present with an astonished "Good
gracious! how anybody can even _pretend_ to shiver on a day like this!"
She added: "Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all
the afternoon? Here's Lydia going already."

Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his
answer. "Julia," he said solemnly, "did you ever consider how many kinds
of murder aren't mentioned in the statute books?"

"Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!"

"Oh, I remember Lydia!" he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on
her shoulder. "Are you really going, my dear? I'll walk along to the
waiting-room with you."

"Don't talk her to death!" cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.

"I won't say a word," he answered.

It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the
exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative,
cock-sure periods.

Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a
complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun,
and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As
they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: "Godfather,
how can we, any of us, do any better?"

"God knows!" he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.

Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the
next car left for Bellevue.

"There's been an accident in