“I don’t know but this is more important than books,” said Ellen.

“Oh, maybe you’ll find out something in your books that will settle the whole matter,” said Andrew.  Ellen was not eating much supper, and that troubled him.  Andrew always knew just how much Ellen ate.

“I don’t know what Aunt Eva and poor little Amabel will do,” said she.  Ellen’s lip quivered.

“Pass the cake to Miss Higgins,” said Fanny, sharply, to Andrew.  She gave him a significant wink as she did so, not to talk more about it.

“Try some of that chocolate cake, Miss Higgins.”

“Thank you,” said Miss Higgins, unexcitedly.

Andrew had his own cause of worry, and finally reverted to it, eating his food with no more conception of the savor than if it were in another man’s mouth.  He was sorry enough for his wife’s sister, and recognized it as an added weight to his own burden, but just at present all he could think of was the question if Miss Higgins would ask for her pay again that night.  He had not a dollar in his pocket.  He had been dunned that afternoon by the man who had lent the money to buy Ellen’s watch, there were two new dunning letters in his pocket, and now if that keen little dressmaker, who fairly looked to him like a venomous insect, as she sat eating rather voraciously of the chocolate cake, should ask him again for the three dollars due her that night!  He would not have cared so much, if it were not for the fact that she would ask him before his wife and Ellen, and the question about the money in the savings-bank, which was a species of nightmare to him, would be sure to come to the front.

Suddenly it struck Andrew that he might run away, that he might slip out after supper, and either go into his mother’s house or down the street.  He finally decided on the former, since he reasoned, with a pitiful cunning, that if he went down the street he would have to take off his slippers and put on his shoes, and that would at once betray him and lead to the possible arrest of his flight.

So after supper, while Miss Higgins was trying a waist on Ellen, and Fanny was clearing the table, Andrew, bareheaded and in his slippers, prepared to carry his plan into execution.  He got out without being seen, and hurried around the rear of the house, out of view from the sitting-room windows, resolving on the way that in order to avert the danger of a possible following him to the sanctuary of his mother’s house, he had perhaps better slip down into the orchard behind it and see if the porter apples were ripe.  But when, stooping as if beneath some invisible shield, and moving with a low glide of secrecy, he had gained the yard between the two houses, the yard where the three cherry-trees stood, he heard Fanny’s high, insistent voice calling him, and knew that it was all over.  Fanny had her head thrust out of her bedroom window.  “Andrew!  Andrew!” she called.