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 "Haven't you got any relatives at all in this country, Tom?" Mrs. Ellison asked.

She was darning a large, comfortable sock, he wondered for whom, a little gourd of the kind called cymblin pushed into the broken toe. She scarcely looked up from her careful work when she spoke.

"Not a soul," he replied, so readily and cheerfully as to give the impression that he preferred relatives afar to relatives close at hand any day. "Oh well, I have a distant uncle in Kansas City—one of those chaps who takes charge of your detachable property under certain conditions, you know. His name is Blitz."

"Oh, you get out!"

Mrs. Ellison rebuked his apparent facetiousness, not quite understanding the relationship. But Eudora understood all about that kind of uncle. She grinned, not very mirthfully, for she knew that uncommon hard luck must have pushed Tom to Mr. Blitz's door.

"He means a pawnbroker, mother—a place where you leave your watch for ten dollars till you can rake up the money to redeem it."

"Bless my soul!" said Mrs. Ellison, genuinely startled and shocked. She stopped darning to look at him with astonished severity. "I hope you haven't been gamblin'?"

"Mother!" Eudora chided, but gently, the reflection of an ungrinned grin in her eyes. For she had a notion that it must have been that way, knowing men somewhat better than her mother, a state of sophistication not uncommon in any age.

"Just so," Tom admitted, nodding gravely, his eyes as straight ahead as his pipestem pointed.