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Rh who would have kicked me out of his house if I had n't—but I assure you I did n't feel in spirits for a whole week after the financial earthquake."

Letty looked at him smiling. She was not a bad judge of human nature and much shrewder than she looked, and she read Farebrother like an open book—and liked the volume.

"But then, your profession?"

"Oh, yes, my profession. Well, the first thing that cheered my gloom was when I got a contract for an eight-story granite business building. I met on the street that very day the fellow I told you of once—a clever architect, but who has a wife and an army of children on him, and who always looked at me reproachfully in the old days when we met—and I had the satisfaction of telling him that it was work or starvation with me now—and he spoke out the thought I had read so often in his mind before—'It's all right now, but when I saw you driving those thoroughbreds round the Park, in that imported drag of yours, and heard of you buying the pick of the pictures at the exhibition, while I had seven children to bring up and educate on my earnings, it