Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/852

792 long and attentively. "Rot!" he exclaimed at length. "Some one put her up to it. Or"—and he sat up straight and furious—"it's those accursed papers!" He brought his feeble old fist down on the table. "That's it,—those blamed papers, they've got me again." He flung the pennies into the open fire. It was the first money "Uncle Dan'l" had ever thrown away.

He opened certain of the more enterprising evening papers with an ill-concealed alarm, lest he should read how he, the multimillionaire, had taken pennies from a little girl on the street. But though at that particular time many columns were devoted to him personally, from his financial schemes for squeezing the market, down to his well-known eccentricity of filling his pockets with apples furnished with the gratuitous luncheon enjoyed by a certain board of directors of which he was president, nothing was said about the little girl and the pennies, and "Uncle Dan'l" again found himself drawing a free breath. A week later a feeling that he was at a loss to classify impelled him not only to go down that same street, but to look carefully for that same little girl.

She was rolling a hoop rather disconsolately, and promptly caught it as the old gentleman drew near.

"I've been so worried about you," she began, with great candor. "I'm sorry I didn't give you more pennies the other day; I was afraid that two would not be enough. You haven't—" She hesitated to put such a bold question.

He finished for her,—"I've managed to make out without them, but it was a tight pinch."

"Yes," reflectively, "I felt from the first you were worthy; it has worried me lots."

"But it's never wise to be hasty," said the old gentleman. "Suppose that I had not been deserving, and you had given me that sum of money,—let's see, now, how much was it in good round numbers?"

"Nine cents in all," she answered, un- consciously bridling with importance at being the custodian of such a sum.

"A great risk, disbursing so large a fund, eh? Where, if the question is not impertinent, may I ask, did you get it?"

And the Lady Bountiful told the story of her conversion by the bishop's charity sermon, and how she had changed her dime into pennies, and the trouble she had had finding worthy ones to give them to. Indeed, with the exception of the old woman who ground the dumb music-box, and the old gentleman himself, "God's poor" had been as hard to get hold of as the pennies themselves.

"You'd never make a financier," the old gentleman interrupted—and now he did not look in the least like an ogre in the blue and gold fairy-book, but like the kindest old gentleman in the world. "You'd never make a financier. You've played the deuce with your capital."

"Capital?" inquired the Lady Bountiful, vaguely. "Is that the money you take from other people?"

The old gentleman smiled. "Capital goes by a good many aliases—'A rose by any other name,' you know; or very probably you don't know,—they haven't begun to talk to you like that yet?"

No, decidedly "they" had not begun to talk to her like that, but they had said other things, and the lamp-post on the corner reminded her of one of them. "I can't cross the street or go further than the corner," for they had come to the boundary that had so often cut off possibilities of adventure.

"Anything else?" inquired the old gentleman.

"And I can't speak to other children, because my aunt says that in New York you can never tell."

"So it's to the loss of my youth that I may attribute the pleasure of your acquaintance?"

"But I don't feel that you are a bit old," she said, sincerely offering the most unctuous flattery; "there is something about you that isn't like grown people. Maybe"—she looked at him meditatively—"maybe you are a half -orphan. I am a half-orphan, and it explains a great deal. My aunt's nurse said that at dancing-school the other day when I had no buttons on my blue dress—not this aunt, another one at home. My cousins are in the same class; they always have buttons."

"D'you know, I'm often shy on buttons myself. No mistake, there's a pair of us, only I'm worse than a half-orphan."