his knees on the marble floor. The men reading in
the arm-chairs about started to their feet; a porter came running,
and took hold of Bittridge. "Do you want an officer, Judge Kenton?" he
panted.

"No, no!" Kenton answered, choking and trembling. "Don't arrest him. I
wish to go to my rooms, that's all. Let him go. Don't do anything about
it."

"I'll help you, judge," said the porter. "Take hold of this fellow," he
said to two other porters who came up. "Take him to the desk, and
tell the clerk he struck Judge Kenton, but the judge don't want him
arrested."

Before Kenton reached the elevator with Boyne, who was rubbing his
knees and fighting back the tears, he heard the clerk's voice saying,
formally, to the porters, "Baggage out of 35 and 37" and adding, as
mechanically, to Bittridge: "Your rooms are wanted. Get out of them at
once!"

It seemed the gathering of neighborhood about Kenton, where he had felt
himself so unfriended, against the outrage done him, and he felt the
sweetness of being personally championed in a place where he had thought
himself valued merely for the profit that was in him; his eyes filled,
and his voice failed him in thanking the elevator-boy for running before
him to ring the bell of his apartment.

VIII.

The next day, in Tuskingum, Richard, Kenton found among the letters of
his last mail one which he easily knew to be from his sister Lottie,
by the tightly curled-up handwriting, and by the unliterary look of the
slanted and huddled address of the envelope: The only doubt he could
have felt in opening it was from the unwonted length at which she had
written him; Lottie usually practised a laconic brevity in her notes,
which were suited to the poverty of her written vocabulary rather than
the affluence of her spoken word.

"Dear Dick" [her letter ran, tripping and stumbling in its course],
"I have got to tell you about something that has just happened here,
and you needent laugh at the speling, or the way I tell it, but just
pay attention to the thing itself, if you please. That disgusting
Bittridge has been here with his horrid wiggy old mother, and momma
let him take Ellen to the theatre. On the way home he tried to make
her promise she would marry him and at the door he kissed her. They
had an awful night with her hiseterics, and I heard momma going in
and out, and trying to comfort her till daylight, nearly. In the
morning I went down with pop