“Not just after he’s taken such a pretty view of the cabin front of the Pontiac from the street, father!  No!  He’s going to give us a copy, and put the other in a shop window in Montgomery Street.”

“That’s so,” said Mr. Nott, musingly; “it’s no slouch of an advertisement.  ‘The Pontiac,’ the property of A. Nott, Esq., of St. Jo, Missouri.  Send it on to your aunt Phoebe; sorter make the old folks open their eyes—­oh?  Well, seem’ he’s been to some expense fittin’ up an entrance from the other street, we’ll let him slide.  But as to that d——­d old Frenchman Ferrers, in the next loft, with his stuck-up airs and high-falutin style, we must get quit of him; he’s regularly gouged me in that ere horsehair spekilation.”

“How can you say that, father!” said Rosey, with a slight increase of color.  “It was your own offer.  You know those bales of curled horsehair were left behind by the late tenant to pay his rent.  When Mr. De Ferrieres rented the room afterwards, you told him you’d throw them in in the place of repairs and furniture.  It was your own offer.”

“Yes, but I didn’t reckon ther’d ever be a big price per pound paid for the darned stuff for sofys and cushions and sich.”

“How do you know he knew it, father?” responded Rosey.

“Then why did he look so silly at first, and then put on airs when I joked him about it, eh?”

“Perhaps he didn’t understand your joking, father.  He’s a foreigner, and shy and proud, and—­not like the others.  I don’t think he knew what you meant then, any more than he believed he was making a bargain before.  He may be poor, but I think he’s been—­a—­a—­gentleman.”

The young girl’s animation penetrated even Mr. Nott’s slow comprehension.  Her novel opposition, and even the prettiness it enhanced, gave him a dull premonition of pain.  His small round eyes became abstracted, his mouth remained partly open, even his fresh color slightly paled.

“You seem to have been takin’ stock of this yer man, Rosey,” he said, with a faint attempt at archness; “if he warn’t ez old ez a crow, for all his young feathers, I’d think he was makin’ up to you.”

But the passing glow had faded from her young cheeks, and her eyes wandered again to her book.  “He pays his rent regularly every steamer night,” she said, quietly, as if dismissing an exhausted subject, “and he’ll be here in a moment, I dare say.”  She took up her book, and leaning her head on her hand, once more became absorbed in its pages.

An uneasy silence followed.  The rain beat against the windows, the ticking of a clock became audible, but still Mr. Nott sat with vacant eyes fixed on his daughter’s face, and the constrained smile on his lips.  He was conscious that he had never seen her look so pretty before, yet he could not tell why this was no longer an unalloyed satisfaction.  Not but that he had always accepted the admiration of others for her as a matter of course, but for the