"I'm going to be your lawyer, you know," Charlie Jamieson explained. "Girls like you don't have much use for a lawyer, as a rule, but I guess you need one about as badly as anyone I can think of. So I'm going to take the job, unless you know someone better."
"No, indeed," they chorused in answer, and both laughed when they saw that he was joking.
"I wish about a thousand other people were as anxious as that to be my clients. Then maybe I'd make enough money to pay my office rent."
"Don't you believe him, girls," said Eleanor, laughing, too. "He's one of the smartest young lawyers in this town, and he's busy most of the time, too. He always is, lately, when I want him to come to one of my parties or anything like that."
"Well, let's be serious for a while," said Jamieson. "I'm going to try to help your father out of his trouble, Zara, and I'm finding it pretty hard, because he doesn't want to trust me, or tell me much of anything. Perhaps you'll be able to do better."
Zara looked grave.
"I don't know much," she said. "But I do know this. My father used to trust people, but they've treated him so badly that he's afraid to do it any more. Like Farmer Weeks—I think' he trusted him."
"That's more than I'd do," said the lawyer, with a grin, "From all I've heard of him I wouldn't trust him around the corner with a counterfeit nickel—if I wanted it back. And—well, that sort of helps to get us started, doesn't it? You know why your father's in trouble? It's because they say he's been making bad money at that little house where you lived in Hedgeville."
"He didn't!" said Zara. "I know he didn't!"
"Well, the district attorney—he's the one who has to be against your father, you know—says that everyone in Hedgeville seems to think he did. And he says that where there's so much smoke there must be some fire; that if so many people think your father was crooked, they must be right. I told him that was unfair, but he just laughed at me."