"Pay her, Sam, and let her go, do!" begged Elizabeth in a frightened whisper.
"I ought not to pay the girl, I'm sure of that; but to save you further annoyance, my dear—" He counted out twenty-two dollars, and pushed the little pile of bills across the table. "Take it," he said peremptorily, "and go."
The two gazed at each other in silence while the loud trampling footsteps of the erstwhile gentle and noiseless Annita sounded in the rear. Then, when a violent and expressive bang of the kitchen door announced the fact that their domestic had finally shaken off the dust of her departure against them, Elizabeth burst into a relieved laugh. She came presently and perched on her husband's knee.
"Sam, dear," she murmured, "it is all my fault, every bit of it. No; don't contradict me—nor interrupt—please! We can't afford to go on this way, and we're not going to. We'll begin over again, just as we meant to before I—" she paused while a flood of shamed colour swept over her drooped face "—tried to be fashionable. It isn't really so very much fun to go to card-parties and teas and luncheons, and I don't care a bit about it all, especially if—if it is going to cost us too much; and I—can see that it has already."
All her little newly acquired graces and affectations dropped away as she spoke, and her husband saw the sweet, womanly soul he had loved and longed for in the beginning looking out of her brown eyes. He kissed her thankfully, almost solemnly. "Dear Betty," he whispered.
"Couldn't we—go away from this place?" she went on after a while. "It isn't very pleasant, is it? and—I'm almost ashamed to say it—but Evelyn Tripp has such a way of making things look different to one. What she says sounds so—so sensible that I can't—at least I haven't done as I intended in hardly anything."
"There's a little red cottage to let, with a pocket-handkerchief lawn in front and room for a garden behind, not half a mile from where we are working," Sam told her, "but I haven't mentioned it because it's a long way to Tremont Street and—Evelyn." His blue eyes were full of the laughing light she had missed vaguely for more weeks than she cared to remember.
"Let's engage it to-morrow!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "Why, Sam dear, we could have roses and strawberries and all sorts of fun out there!"
When, after missing her friend for several days, Miss Tripp called at the Brewster apartment she was astonished beyond measure to find her dearest Elizabeth busy packing some last trifles, while several brawny men were engaged in taking away the furniture.
"My dear!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing?"