Miss Wiggin never trusted anybody but herself to lock up the offices, not even Mr. Tutt, and upon this particular evening she had made this an excuse to linger on after the others had gone home and waylay him.  Such encounters were by no means infrequent and usually had a bearing upon the ethical aspect of some proposed course of legal procedure on the part of the firm.

Miss Minerva regarded Samuel Tutt as morally an abandoned and hopeless creature.  Mr. Ephraim Tutt she loved with a devotion rare among a sex with whom devotion is happily a common trait, but there was a maternal quality in her affection accounted for by the fact that although Mr. Tutt was, to be sure, an old man in years, he had occasionally an elfin, Puck-like perversity which was singularly boyish, at which times she felt it obligatory for her own self-respect to call him to order.  Thus, whenever Tutt seemed to be incubating some evasion of law which seemed more subtly plausible than ordinary she made it a point to call it to Mr. Tutt’s attention.  Also, whenever, as in the present case, she felt that by following the advice given by the junior member of the firm a client was about to embark upon some dubious enterprise or questionable course of conduct she endeavored to counteract his influence by appealing to the head of the firm.

During the interview between Tutt and Payson Clifford the door had been open and she had heard all of it; moreover, after Payson had gone away Tutt had called her in and gone over the situation with her.  And she regarded Tutt’s advice to his client,—­not the purely legal aspect of it, but the personal and persuasive part of it,—­as an interference with that young gentleman’s freedom of conscience.

“Dear me!—­I didn’t know you were still here, Minerva!” exclaimed her employer as she confronted him in the outer office.  “Is anything worrying you?”

“Not dangerously!” she replied with a smile.  “And perhaps it’s none of my business—­”

“My business is thy business, my dear!” he answered.  “Without you Tutt & Tutt would not be Tutt & Tutt.  My junior partner may be the eyes and legs of the firm and I may be some other portion of its anatomy, but you are its heart and its conscience.  Out with it!  What rascality portends?  What bird of evil omen hovers above the offices of Tutt & Tutt?  Spare not an old man bowed down with the sorrows of this world!  Has my shrewd associate counseled the robbing of a bank or the kidnapping from a widowed mother of her orphaned child?”

“Nothing quite so bad as that!” she retorted.  “It’s merely that Mr. Samuel Tutt used his influence this afternoon to try to persuade a young man not to carry out his father’s wishes—­expressed in a legally ineffective way—­and I think he succeeded—­although I’m not quite sure.”

“That must have been Payson Clifford,” answered Mr. Tutt.  “What were the paternal wishes?”

“Mr. Tutt found a letter with the will in which the father asked the son to give twenty-five thousand dollars to a Miss Sadie Burch.”