The older sister, seated at a little table under the gaslight, was deep in work.

“She’s been doing that every night this week,” said Miss Mary angrily, “as if she didn’t have enough to do!”

“What is it?” asked Susan.  Miss Lydia threw down her pen, and stretched her cramped fingers.

“Why, Mrs. Lawrence’s sister is going to be married,” she explained, “and the family wants an alphabetic list of friends to send the announcements to.  This is the old list, and this the new one, and here’s his list, and some names her mother jotted down,—­they’re all to be put in order.  It’s quite a job.”

“At double pay, of course,” Miss Mary said bitterly.

“I should hope so,” Susan added.

Miss Lydia merely smiled humorously, benevolently, over her work.

“All in the day’s work, Susan.”

“All in your grandmother’s foot,” Susan said, inelegantly.  Miss Lydia laughed a little reproachfully, but the invalid’s rare, hearty laugh would have atoned to her for a far more irreverent remark.

“And no ’Halma’?” Susan said, suddenly.  For the invalid lived for her game, every night.  “Why didn’t you tell me.  I could have come up every night—­” She got out the board, set up the men, shook Mary’s pillows and pushed them behind the aching back.  “Come on, Macduff,” said she.

“Oh, Susan, you angel!” Mary Lord settled herself for an hour of the keenest pleasure she ever knew.  She reared herself in her pillows, her lanky yellow hand hovered over the board, she had no eyes for anything but the absurd little red and yellow men.

She was a bony woman, perhaps forty-five, with hair cut across her lined forehead in the deep bang that had been popular in her girlhood.  It was graying now, as were the untidy loops of hair above it, her face was yellow, furrowed, and the long neck that disappeared into her little flannel bed-sack was lined and yellowed too.  She lay, restlessly and incessantly shifting herself, in a welter of slipping quilts and loose blankets, with her shoulders propped by fancy pillows,—­some made of cigar-ribbons, one of braided strips of black and red satin, one in a shield of rough, coarse knotted lace, and one with a little boy printed in color upon it, a boy whose trousers were finished with real tin buttons.  Mary Lord was always the first person Susan thought of when the girls in the office argued, ignorantly and vigorously, for or against the law of compensation.  Here, in this stuffy boarding-house room, the impatient, restless spirit must remain, chained and tortured day after day and year after year, her only contact with the outer world brought by the little private governess,—­her sister—­who was often so tired and so dispirited when she reached home, that even her gallant efforts could not hide her depression from the keen eyes of the sick woman.  Lydia taught the three small children of one of the city’s richest women, and she