The bookkeeper winced.
“I thought I was marrying an heiress when I married your aunt,” he said, “but within six months of our wedding day, her father made a bad failure, and actually had the assurance to ask me to give him a home under my roof.”
“Did you do it?”
“No; I told him it would not be convenient.”
“What became of him?”
“He got a small clerkship at ten dollars a week in the counting room of a mercantile friend, and filled it till one day last October, when he dropped dead of apoplexy. I made a great mistake when I married in not asking him to settle a definite sum on his daughter. It would have been so much saved from the wreck.”
“Did aunt want him to come and live here?”
“Yes, women are always unreasonable. She would have had me support the old man in idleness, but I am not one of that kind. Every tub should stand on its own bottom.”
“I say so, too, uncle. Do you know whether this boy, Carl Crawford, has any father or mother?”
“From a word Jennings let fall I infer that he has relatives, but is not on good terms with them. I have been a little afraid he might stand in your light.”