"I'm afraid there is," said Roger. "It doesn't look very well for a young man of his age to be doing no better than delivering papers."
"It gives him time to study law," she answered, quickly. "If he clerked all day in a store, he couldn't."
"I didn't know he was studying now. I thought I'd heard that he was in a lawyer's office for a few weeks last year, and was turned out for setting fire to it with a pipe—"
"It was an accident," she interposed.
"But some pretty important papers were burned, and after that none of the other lawyers would have him."
"He's not in an office," she admitted. "I didn't mean that. But he studies a great deal. He goes to the courts all the time they're in session, and he's bought some books of his own."
"Well—perhaps," he assented; "but they say he gambles and drinks, and that last week Judge Pike threatened to have him arrested for throwing dice with some negroes behind the Judge's stable."
"What of it? I'm about the only nice person in town that will have anything to do with him—and nobody except you thinks I'M very nice!"
"Ariel! Ariel!"
"I know all about his gambling with darkies," she continued, excitedly, her voice rising, "and I know that he goes to saloons, and that he's an intimate friend of half the riffraff in town; and I know the reason for it, too, because he's told me. He wants to know them, to understand them; and he says some day they'll make him a power, and then he can help them!"