“I rather guess not,” said Andrew, but he was sick at heart.  Only that afternoon the man from whom he had borrowed the money to buy Ellen’s watch and chain had asked him for it.  He had not a cent in advance for his weekly pay; he could not see where the money for Ellen’s clothes was coming from.  It was long since the “Golden Hope” had been quoted in the stock-list, but the next morning Andrew purchased a morning paper.  He had stopped taking one regularly.  He put on his spectacles, and spread out the paper in his shaking hands, and scrutinized the stock-list eagerly, but he could not find what he wanted.  The “Golden Hope” had long since dropped to a still level below all record of fluctuations.  A young man passing to his place at the bench looked over his shoulder.  “Counting up your dividends, Brewster?” he asked, with a grin.

Andrew folded up the paper gloomily and made no reply.

“Irish dividends, maybe,” said the man, with a chuckle at his own wit, and a backward roll of a facetious eye.

“Oh, shut up, you’re too smart to live,” said the man who stood next at the bench.  He was a young fellow who had been a school-mate of Ellen in the grammar-school.  He had left to go to work when she had entered the high-school.  His name was Dixon.  He was wiry and alert, with a restless sparkle of bright eyes in a grimy face, and he cut the leather with lightning-like rapidity.  Dixon had always thought Ellen the most beautiful girl in Rowe.  He looked after Andrew with a sharp pain of sympathy when he went away with the roll of newspaper sticking out of his pocket.

“Poor old chap,” he said to the facetious man, thrusting his face angrily towards him.  “He has had a devil of a time since he begun to grow old.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  Wait till you begin to drop behind.  It’s what’s bound to come to the whole boiling of us.”

“Mind your jaw,” said the first man, with a scowl.

“You’d better mind yours,” said Dixon, slashing furiously at the leather.

That noon Dixon offered Andrew, shamefacedly, taking him aside lest the other men see, a piece of pie of a superior sort which his mother had put into his dinner bag, but Andrew thanked him kindly and refused it.  He could eat nothing whatever that noon.  He kept thinking about the dressmaker, and how Fanny would ask him again to take some of that money out of the bank to pay her, and how the money was already taken out.

That evening, when he sat down to the tea-table furnished with the best china and frosted cake in honor of the dressmaker, and heard the radiant talk about Ellen’s new frills and tucks, he had a cold feeling at his heart.  He was ashamed to look at the dressmaker.

“You won’t know your daughter when we get her fixed up for Vassar,” she told Andrew, with a smirk which covered her face with a network of wrinkles under her blond fluff of hair.