for a long time looking at the
silhouette of the windows. "...I wonder what they said to each other...."
she thought.

The next morning Mary was going through her mail at the office when she
came to an envelope with a newspaper clipping in it. This had been cut
from the society notes of the New Bethel _Herald_.

"Burdon Woodward has a specially designed new car which is attracting
much attention."

The clipping had been pasted upon a sheet of paper, and underneath it,
the following two questions were typewritten:

"How can a man buy $8,000 cars on a $10,000 salary?

"Why don't you audit his books and see who paid for that car?"

Mary's cheeks stung with the brutality of it.

"What a horrible thing to do!" she thought. "If any one paid attention to
things like this--why, no one would be safe!"

She was on the point of tearing it to shreds when another thought struck
her.

"Perhaps I ought to show it to him," she uneasily thought. "If a thing
like this is being whispered around, I think he ought to get to the
bottom of it, and stop it.... I know I don't like him for some things,"
she continued, more undecided than ever, "but that's all the more reason
why I should be fair to him--in things like this, for instance."

She compromised by tucking the letter in her pocket, and when Judge
Cutler dropped in that afternoon, she first made him promise secrecy, and
then she showed it to him.

"I feel like you," he said at last. "An anonymous attack like this is
usually beneath contempt. And I feel all the more like ignoring it
because it raises a question which I have been asking myself lately: How
_can_ a man on a ten thousand dollar salary afford to buy an eight
thousand dollar car?"

Mary couldn't follow that line of reasoning at all.

"Why do you feel like ignoring it, if it's such a natural question?" she
asked.

"Because it's a question that might have occurred to anybody."

That puzzled Mary, too.

"Perhaps Burdon has money beside his salary," she suggested.

"He hasn't. I know he hasn't. He's in debt right now."

They thought it over in silence.

"I think if I were you, I'd tear it up," he said at last.

She promptly tore it into shreds.

"Now we'll forget that," he said. "I must confess, however, that it has
raised another question to my mind. How long is it since your bookkeeping
system was overhauled here?"

She couldn't remember.

"Just what I thought. It must need expert attention. Modern