To Judith’s relief, however, it was Mrs. O’Reilly.
“A note for you, Miss Blount, and the man’s waiting for an answer.”
Judith tore open the envelope impatiently. It was a bill of two years’ running, amounting to nearly forty dollars, from the stationery and candy shop.
On the bottom she was requested to remit at once.
“Tell the man—anything, Mrs. O’Reilly. I can’t see him. That’s all.”
“Certainly, Miss,” said the Irish woman with a good-natured smile.
“These poor young college ladies was in hard luck just like the men sometimes,” she thought as she turned away.
Judith sat down and began to think. Richard was having a great struggle to keep her at college, her mother and himself at the boarding house, and her father in a sanitarium. It would really be unkind to burden him with that bill; but what was to be done?
“Is it that old stationery man again?” asked Madeleine, who had inherited a profound contempt for dunning shopkeepers.
“Yes, it is, and I don’t know what to do.”