This must have surprised Miss Caroline as much as it rejoiced her, for she took up the matter with Clem, and in so clumsy a fashion that he, perhaps owing to his enfeebled condition, witlessly made a confession at variance with mine, and with an effect of candor that moved his questioner to take his word rather than that of an officer and a gentleman.  Of course this was not at all like Clem.  In referring to sums of money due him he had ever been wont to chant them with a bard-like inflation that recognized only sums of a vague but immense rotundity.  I had never known him to be thus prosaic, and I suspected that Miss Caroline had, in a sudden impulse of doubt, terrified him into being so brutally explicit.

Whence fell a coldness between Miss Caroline and me, for the discrepancy between Clem’s confession and mine was not slight.  Even my mutterings about interest having accumulated were put down as the desperate resource of embarrassment.  Miss Caroline did not even dignify them with her notice, and the coldness increased.

Yet, while it was a true coldness, it was distinguished by a certain alien quality of warmth, for Miss Caroline, though now on guard against any mere vulgar benevolence of mine, talked to me frankly, as she had never done before, about her situation.

First, it was impossible to think of going to her daughter.  There were debts in the town; Clem would be unable to work for many weeks; and not only had Little Miss’s contribution from her small wage now failed, but she herself had incurred debts and would be without money to pay them.

My neighbor depicted the gravity of this situation with a spirit that taxed my powers of admiration,—­powers not slight, I may explain; for had they not already been developed beyond the ordinary by this same woman?  Not even was she downcast in my presence.  In fine, she was superbly Miss Caroline to me.  If I saw that to herself she was an ill-fated old woman, perversely surviving a wreck with which she should have gone down, alone in a land that seemed unkind because it did not understand, and in desperate straits for the commonest stuff in the world,—­why, that was no matter to be opened between us.  We affected with mild philosophy to study a situation that not only did not require study but scarcely permitted it by candid souls.  But we affected to agree that something must be done, which sounded very well indeed.

As a sign that she bore me no malice it was promised that I might hire a man to plant Clem’s garden that spring, with the understanding that I should thus acquire an equity in its product.  This seemed to be in the line of that something that must be done, and Miss Caroline and I made much of it, to avoid the situation’s more embarrassing aspects.

“If I could only sell something,” said my neighbor, with a vacant look about the room—­a look of humorous disparagement.  “The silver is good, but there’s hardly enough of it to pay one of those debts—­and I’ve nothing else but Clem.  But if I tried to sell him,” she added brightly, “it would only bring on trouble again with your Northern President.  I know just how it would be.”