If any such morbid fancy were in the girl's head, there was no tear to betray it.

The sordid, hard figures seemed to her types of the years coming, but she wrote them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had nothing better for her, so she did not care.

She finished soon: they had given her only an hour or two's work for the first day.

She closed the books, wiped the pens in a quaint, mechanical fashion, then got down and examined her new home.
It was soon understood.

There were the walls with their broken plaster, showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over them, sketches with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had been an artist in his way,--his name, P.Teagarden, emblazoned on the ceiling with the smoke of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P.Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple.