“It gets you out of your difficulty, doesn’t it?” asked Tutt.  “Don’t borrow trouble!  Don’t—­if you’ll pardon my saying so—­be an idiot!”

There was silence for several minutes, finally broken by the lawyer who came back again to the charge with renewed vigor.

“Why, this sort of thing comes up all the time.  Take this sort of a case, for instance.  The law only lets a man will away a certain proportion of his property to charity—­says it isn’t right for him to do so, if he leaves a family.  Now suppose your father had given all his property to charity, would you feel obliged to impoverish yourself for the benefit of a Home for Aged Mariners?”

“Really,” replied the bewildered Payson.  “I don’t know.  But anyway I’m satisfied you’re quite right and I’m tremendously obliged.  However,” he added musingly, “I’d rather like to know who this Sadie Burch is!”

“If I were you, young man,” advised the lawyer sagely, “I wouldn’t try to find out!”

Mr. Payson Clifford left the offices of Tutt & Tutt more recalcitrant against fate and irritated with his family than when he had entered them.  He had found himself much less comfortably provided for than he had expected, and the unpleasant impression created by the supposed paternal relatives at his father’s funeral had been heightened by the letter regarding Sadie Burch.  There was something even more offensively plebeian about them than that of the vulgar Weng.  It would have been bad enough to have had to consider the propriety of paying over a large sum to a lady calling herself by an elegant or at least debonair name like Claire Desmond or Lillian Lamar,—­but Sadie!  And Burch!  Ye gods!  It was ignoble, sordid.  That was a fine discovery to make about one’s father!

As he walked slowly up Fifth Avenue to his hotel it must be confessed that his reflections upon that father’s memory were far from filial.  He told himself that he’d always suspected something furtive about the old man, who must have been under most unusual and extraordinary obligations to a woman to whom he desired his son to turn over twenty-five thousand dollars.  It was pretty nearly half of his entire fortune!  Would cut down his income from around four thousand to nearly two thousand!  The more he pondered upon the matter the more the lawyer’s arguments seemed absolutely convincing.  Lawyers knew more than other people about such things, anyway.  You paid them for their advice, and he would doubtless have to pay Tutt for his upon this very subject, which, somehow, seemed to be rather a good reason for following it.  No, he would dismiss Sadie Burch and the letter forever from his mind.  Very likely she was dead anyway, whoever she was.  Four thousand a year!  Not a bad income for a bachelor!

And while our innocent young Launcelot trudging uptown hardened his heart against Sadie Burch, by chance that lady figured in a short but poignant conversation between Mr. Ephraim Tutt and Miss Minerva Wiggin on the threshold of the room from which he had just departed.