Page:Mary Rinehart - More Tish .djvu/181

 Rh  that but without so much as a screen, or a closet in which to hang up his clothing.

"What do you mean, hang up my clothes?" he said when we protested. "They're hung up all right—on me."

"It seems rather terrible," Aggie objected gently. "No privacy or anything."

"Privacy! I haven't got anything to hide."

We found some little comfort, however, in the fact that beneath the pitiful cot that he called his bed he had a small tin trunk. Even that was destroyed, however, by the entrance of a thin young man called Smithers, who reached under the cot and dragging out the trunk proceeded to take out one of the pairs of socks that Aggie had knitted.

Charlie Sands paid no attention, but Tish fixed this person with a cold eye.

"Haven't you made a mistake?" she inquired. The young man was changing his socks, with his back to us, and he looked back over his shoulder.

"Sorry!" he said. "Didn't like to ask you to go out. Haven't any place else to go, you know."

"Aren't you putting on my nephew's socks?"

"Extraordinary!" he said. "Did you notice that?"

"I'll trouble you to take them off, young man."

"Well," he said reflectively, "I'll tell you what