“Well, she shall be. I'll go out and steal before she sha'n't have proper care. Poor Eva!” Fanny burst into the hysterical wailing which had shaken her from head to foot at intervals during the last twenty-four hours. Andrew shuddered, thinking that he detected in her cries a resemblance to her sister's ravings. “Don't, don't, Fanny,” he pleaded. “Don't, poor girl.” He put his arm around her, and she wept on his shoulder, but with less abandon. “After all, we've got each other, and we've got Ellen, haven't we, Andrew?” she sobbed.
“Yes, thank God,” said Andrew. “Don't, Fanny.”
“That—that's more than money, more than all the wages for all the labor in the world, and that we've got, haven't we, Andrew? We've got what comes to us direct from God, haven't we? Don't think I'm silly, Andrew—haven't we?”
“Yes, yes, we have—you are right, Fanny,” replied Andrew.
“I guess I am, too,” she assented, looking up in Andrew's poor, worn face with eyes of sudden bravery. “We'll get along somehow—don't you worry, old man. I guess we'll come out all right, somehow. We'll use that money in the bank as far as it goes, and then I guess some way will be opened.”
Then there came over Andrew's exaltation, to which Fanny's words had spurred his flagging spirit, a damper of utter mortification and guilt. He felt that he could bear this no longer. He opened his mouth to tell her what he had done with the money in the bank, when there came a knock on the door, and Fanny fled into the bedroom. She had unfastened her dress, and her face was stained with tears. She shut the bedroom door tightly as Andrew opened the outer one.
The man who had loaned him the money to buy Ellen's watch stood there. His name was William Evarts, and he worked in the stitching-room of McGuire's factory, in which Andrew was employed. He was reported well-to-do, and to have amassed considerable money from judicious expenditures of his savings, and to be strictly honest, but hard in his dealings. He was regarded with a covert disfavor by his fellow-workmen, as if he were one of themselves who had somehow elevated himself to a superior height by virtue of their backs. If William Evarts had acquired prosperity through gambling in mines, they would have had none of that feeling; they would have recognized the legitimacy of luck in the conduct of affairs. He was in a way a reproach to them. “Why can't you get along and save as well as William Evarts?” many a man's monitor asked of him. “He doesn't earn any more than you do, and has had as many expenses in his family.” The man not being able to answer the question to his own credit, disliked William Evarts who had instigated it.
Andrew, who had in his character a vein of sterling justice, yet felt that he almost hated William Evarts as he stood there before him, small and spare, snapping as it were with energy like electric wires, the strong lines in his clean-shaven face evident in the glare of the street-lamp.
“Good-evening,” Andrew said, and he spoke like a criminal before a judge, and at that moment he felt like one.
“Good-evening,” responded the other man. Then he added, in a hushed voice at first, for he had fineness to appreciate a sort of indecency in dunning, in asking a man for even his rightful due, and he had a regard for possible listening ears of femininity, “I was passing by, and I thought I'd call and see if it was convenient for you to pay me that money.”