The maid sniffed again, and her sniff meant the gratification of the cook who sees her work appreciated, and something else—­an indulgent scorn.  “Well, I guess there is reason enough for them relishing it,” said she.

Mrs. Anderson made a soft, interrogatory noise, all that was consistent with her dignity and her sense of honor as a recent hostess towards departed guests.

The maid went on.  “They do say,” said she, “them as knows, that them Carrolls do not have enough to eat.”

Mrs. Anderson made a little exclamation expressive of horror and pity.

“Yes, they do say so,” the maid went on, solemnly.  “They do say, them that knows, that them Carrolls be owing everybody in Banbridge, and have cheated folks that have trusted in them awful.”

“Well, I am sorry if it is so,” said Mrs. Anderson, with a sigh, “but of course this young lady who was here to-night and her little brother can’t be to blame in any way, Emma.”

The maid sniffed with a deprecating disagreement.  “Mebbe they be not,” said she.  She was rather a pretty girl, in her late girlhood, thin and large-boned, with a bright color on her evident cheek-bones, and with small, sparkling, blue eyes.  She was extremely neat and trim, moreover, in her personal habits, and to-night was quite gorgeously arrayed in a light silk waist and a nice black skirt.  She was expecting her beau to take her to evening prayer-meeting.  She was a very religious girl, and had reclaimed her beau, who had had a liking for the gin-mills previous to keeping company with her.

“Of course they are not,” said Mrs. Anderson, with some warmth of partisanship, remembering poor little Charlotte’s pretty, anxious face and her tiny, soft, clinging hands.  She glanced, as she spoke, at the maid’s large, red-knuckled fingers with a mental comparison.

The maid was fixed in her own rendering of English verbs, and had told her beau that her mistress did not speak just right, like most old folks.

“Mebbe they be not,” she said, with firm doubt.  Then she added, “It would not hurt them Carroll ladies, that young lady, nor her mother, nor her aunt, if they was to take hold, and do the housework them own selves, instead of keeping a girl, who they do not never pay.”

“Oh, dear!  Do you know that?”

“Indeed I do know that!  Ed, he told me.  He had it straight from them Hungarians who live in the house back of his married sister’s.  The Carroll girl, she goes there, and she told them, and them told Ed’s sister.”

“Perhaps she has had some of her wages.  You don’t mean she has not been paid at all?” Mrs. Anderson said.

“I mean not at all,” the maid said, firmly.  “That girl that works for them Carrolls has not been paid, not at all.”

“Why does she remain there, then?”

“She would have went a long time ago if she not been afraid, lest, if she had went, it would have come about that she would have lost all she was going to lose as well as that which she had lost before,” replied the girl, and Mrs. Anderson, being accustomed to her method of expression, understood.