Jack was not anything particularly remarkable; he was just one of those lovable good-for-nothings that seem born to get better people into trouble all their lives long.  He had been spoiled originally by being ten years younger than the next youngest in the family; and then, when the children had been shipped on to Aunt Mary’s tender mercies, Jack had won her heart immediately because she accidentally discovered that he had never been baptized, and so felt fully justified in re-naming him after her own father and having the name branded into him for keeps by her own religious apparatus.  It followed naturally that John Watkins, Jr., Denham, for so her father’s daughter had insisted that her youngest nephew should be called, was the favorite nephew of his aunt.

And it was lucky for him that he was the favorite, for Aunt Mary, who was highly spiced at fifty, became peppery at sixty, and almost biting at seventy.  And yet for Jack she would sign checks almost without a murmur.  Mr. Stebbins was much more censorious and impatient with the young man than she ever was; and to all the rest of the world Mr. Stebbins was an urbane and agreeable gentleman, whereas to all the rest of the world Aunt Mary was a problem or a terror.  But Mr. Stebbins needed to be a man of tact and management, for he was the real manager of that fortune of which “Mary, only surviving child of John Watkins, merchant and ship owner,” was the legal possessor; and so tactful was Mr. Stebbins that he and his powerful client had never yet clashed, and they had been in close business relations for almost as many years as Lucinda had been established on the hearthstone of the Watkins home.  Perhaps one reason why Mr. Stebbins endured so well was that he had a real talent for compromising, and that he had skillfully transformed Aunt Mary’s inherited taste for driving a bargain into an acquired pleasure in what is really a polite form of the same action.

So, when it came to the matter of Jack’s difficulties, Mr. Stebbins could always find a half-way measure that saved the situation; and when he received the letter as to the cook and her claim he hied himself to the city at once, and wrote back that the claim could be settled for three hundred dollars.

“And enough, I must say,” Aunt Mary remarked to Lucinda upon receipt of the statement; “three hundred dollars for one cat—­for, after all, Jack blames the whole on the cat, an’ he didn’t hit it, even then.”

Lucinda did not answer.

“But if the boy settles down now I shan’t mind payin’ the three—­Where are you goin’?”

For Lucinda was walking out of the room.

“I’m goin’ to the door,” said she raspingly.  “The bell’s ringin’.”

After a minute or two she came back.

“Telegram!” she announced, handing the yellow envelope over.

Aunt Mary put on her glasses, opened it, and read: 

Cook has blood poison.  Sues for a thousand.  Probable
amputation.