“Mercy!  Would that be twenty dollars for table alone?” the mistress asked.  “It is never that now, I think.  Perhaps twice a week,” she said, turning to Alexandra, “your father gives me five dollars at the breakfast table—­”

“But, Mother, you telephone and charge at the market, and Lewis & Sons, too, don’t you?” Sandy asked.

“Well, yes, that’s true.  Yes, I suppose it comes to fully twenty-five dollars a week, when you think of it.  Yes, it probably comes to more.  But it never seems so much, somehow.  Well, suppose we say twenty-five—­”

“Twenty-five, I’ll tell Dad.”  Alexandra confirmed it briskly.

“I used to keep accounts, years ago,” Mrs. Salisbury said plaintively.  “Your father—­” and again she turned to her daughter, as if to make this revelation of her private affairs less distressing by so excluding the stranger.  “Your father has always been the most generous of men,” she said; “he always gives me more money if I need it, and I try to do the best I can.”  And a little annoyed, in her weakness and helplessness by this business talk, she lay back on her pillow, and closed her eyes.

“Twenty-five a week, then!” Alexandra said, closing the talk by jumping up from a seat on her mother’s bed, and kissing the invalid’s eyes in parting.  Justine, who had remained standing, followed her down to the kitchen, where, with cheering promptitude, the new maid fell upon preparations for dinner.  Alexandra rather bashfully suggested what she had vaguely planned for dinner; Justine nodded intelligently at each item; presently Alexandra left her, busily making butter-balls, and went upstairs to report.

“Nothing sensational about her,” said Sandy to her mother, “but she takes hold!  She’s got some bleaching preparation of soda or something drying on the sink-board; she took the shelf out of the icebox the instant she opened it, and began to scour it while she talked.  She’s got a big blue apron on, and she’s hung a nice clean white one on the pantry door.”

There was nothing sensational about the tray which Justine carried up to the sick room that evening—­nothing sensational in the dinner which was served to the diminished family.  But the Salisbury family began that night to speak of Justine as the “Treasure.”

“Everything hot and well seasoned and nicely served,” said the man of the house in high satisfaction, “and the woman looks like a servant, and acts like one.  Sandy says she’s turning the kitchen upside down, but, I say, give her her head!”

The Treasure, more by accident than design, was indeed given her head in the weeks that followed, for Mrs. Salisbury steadily declined into a real illness, and the worried family was only too glad to delegate all the domestic problems to Justine.  The invalid’s condition, from “nervous breakdown” became “nervous prostration,” and August was made terrible for the loving little group that watched her by the cruel fight with typhoid fever into which