awed admiration as of old.  No one but felt commiseration for him, and trust in his ultimate payment of their wages.  They regarded the other creditors with a sort of mild contempt.  They felt themselves of another kind, especially from the Germans and Jews.  When Willy Eddy’s wife had declaimed, one stenographer had whispered to the other, “How vulgar!” and the other had responded with a nod and curl of a lip of scorn.  They met Madame Griggs’s hostile regard with icy stares.  The less pretty girl said to the young man that she thought it was mean for a dressmaker to come there and hound folks like that, and he nodded, winking disapprovingly at poor Madame Griggs, who was just then cherishing the wild idea of consulting him for herself in his supposed capacity of a lawyer.  The stenographer, turning from her remark to the clerk, met the laughing but impertinent gaze of one of the horse-trading men, and she turned her back upon him with an emphasis that provoked a chuckle from his companion.

“Got it in the shoulder then, Bill,” he remarked, quite audibly, and the other reddened and grinned foolishly.  They were rough-looking men with a certain swagger of smartness.  They regarded Carroll with a swearing emphasis, yet with a measure of reluctantly compelled admiration.

“I’ll be damned if he ain’t the first that ever got the better of Jim Dickerson,” one had said to the other, as they had driven up to the house that evening.  “I’ll be ——­ damned if I see now how he got the better of me,” the other rejoined, with a bewildered expression.  As he spoke his mind revolved in the devious mesh of trap which he had set for Carroll, and realized the clean cutting of it by Carroll by the ruthless method of self-interest.  Neither man had spoken besides a defiant response to Carroll’s polite “Good-evening,” when they had entered.  They sat and watched and listened.  Occasionally one raised a hand, and an enormous diamond glowed with a red light like a ruby.  In the four-in-hand tie of the other a scarf-pin in the shape of a horse’s head with diamond eyes caught the light with infinitesimal sparks of fire.  Above it his clean-shaven, keen, blue-eyed face kept watch, sharply ready to strike anger as the diamonds struck light, and yet with a certain amusement.  He had shown his teeth in a smile when Willy Eddy’s wife pronounced her tirade.  He did so again when she reopened, having regained her wind.  When she spoke this time, she glared at Anna Carroll with a dazzling look of spite.

“There ain’t no red silk dresses for me to rig out in,” said she, and she pointed straight at Anna’s silken skirts.  “No, there ain’t, and there won’t be, so long as my man’s money goes to pay for hers.”  She said “hers” with a harder emphasis than if she said “yours.”

Anna never returned her vicious look, she never moved a muscle of her handsome face, nor changed color.  She continued to stand beside her brother, with a curious expression of wide partisanship, and of regard for these people as objects of offence as a whole, rather than as individuals.