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n some speculation which he had not seen fit to make known to his agent.
"There you go,--off into one of your fogs again!" said the wife, noticing his suddenly abstracted air. "That's the way you have done for the last three months,--ever since you began with that hateful man."
"I get to thinking about affairs, my little woman, and I don't want to bother your simple head with them; so I go cruising off in the fog, as you call it, by myself."
"Oh, if you once get through with that man's affairs, we'll have no more fogs!"
"No, deary, we'll have summer weather and a smooth sea, I hope, for the rest of our voyage."
"You see, John, I have been dreadfully anxious, more than I could tell you. If anything goes wrong, I've always noticed that it isn't the big people that have to suffer; it's the smaller ones that get caught."
"Yes, it's an old story; the big flies break out of the spider's net; the little chaps hang there. But I'll settle up the business to-morrow. I shall have enough to buy us a little house in the country,--a snug box, with a garden; then I'll get a horse to drive about with, and we'll take some comfort. Come, little woman, sit on my knee! Come, baby, here is a knee for you, too!"
Holding them in his arms, he still mused upon the morrow, and once and again charged his mind to remember "two thousand for Sandford, ten thousand for Danforth and Dot!"
CHAPTER XXVII.
Alice did not feel the utter loneliness of her situation, until, as she walked along, square after square, she encountered so many hundreds of abstracted or curious or impudent faces, and reflected that it was upon such people that her future support and comfort would depend. She tried to discover in some countenance the impress of kindly benevolence;--not that she proposed to risk so much as a question; but it was her first experience with the busy world, and she wished to observe its ways, when neither relationship nor pe