It isn't honest, and it isn't good business." "Anything is good business that gets by," remarked Miss Murphy, who had a philosophy.

"I must go indoors or this wind will blow all my puffs away." She departed breezily; and Gabriella, returning to the workroom, spent her afternoon patiently stitching flat garlands of flowers on the brim of a hat.

When she left the house at six o'clock the April weather was so lovely that she decided to walk all the way home; and while she moved rapidly with the crowd in Fifth Avenue, she considered anxiously the possible disastrous results of Madame's anger.

Between her and absolute want there stood only her salary, and she had deliberately--she realized now how deliberate her reply had been--undermined that thin and insecure protection.

Though she was now earning as much as thirty dollars a week, an illness of a year ago, when she had been obliged to stop work for several months, had exhausted the remains of the modest nest egg with which she had started; and to lose her place, she knew, would mean either starvation or beggary.