Carroll looked at the men, and they looked at him.  The two men in the runabout resembled each other, and were evidently brothers.  Carroll’s eyes on the men were sharp, so were theirs on him.  Carroll’s eyes were looking for knavery, and the men’s were looking for suspicion of knavery.

“How much?” asked Carroll, finally.

The men looked at each other.  One made a motion with his lips; the other nodded.

“Fifteen hundred,” said the first speaker, “and damned cheap.”

“Well, you can bring them around, and I’ll look at them,” said Carroll.  “Any night after seven.”

Carroll walked on, turning up the road which led to his own house, and the men whirled about again and then drove on, the mare breaking into a gallop.

Chapter IV

In Banbridge no one in trade was considered in polite society, with one exception.  The exception was Randolph Anderson.  Anderson had studied for the law.  He had set up his office over the post-office, hung out his innocent and appealing little sign, and sat in his new office-chair beside his new desk, surrounded by the majesty of the lettered law, arranged in shelves in alphabetical order, for several years, during which his affairs were constantly on a descending scale.  Then at last came a year when scarcely one client had darkened his doors except Tappan, who wanted to sue a delinquent customer and attach some of his personal property.  After ascertaining that the personal property had been cannily transferred to the debtor’s wife, he had told Anderson, upon the presentation of a modest bill, that he was a fraud and he could have done better himself.  Beside this backward stroke of business, Anderson had that year a will to draw up, for which he was never paid, and had married a couple who had reimbursed him in farm produce.  At the expiration of that year the lawyer, having to all intents and purposes been given up by the law, gave it up in his turn.  Every cent of the money which he had inherited from his father had been expended.  Nothing remained except his mother’s small property, which barely sufficed to support her.  Anderson then borrowed money from his uncle, who was well-to-do, giving him his note for three years, rented a store on Main Street, purchased a stock of groceries, and went into trade.  His course made quite a sensation.  He was the first Anderson in the memory of Banbridge, where the name was an old one, to be outside the genteel pale of a profession.  His father had been a physician, his grandfather a clergyman.

“If my son had studied medicine instead of law, he could have at least subsisted upon the proceeds of his profession,” his mother said, with the gentle and dignified dissent which was her attitude with regard to her son’s startling move.  “People are simply obliged by the laws of the flesh to go through measles and whooping-coughs and mumps, and they have to be born and die, and when they