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“May I ask you a question?”
    â€œOf course you may ask me a question, Betty.”
    â€œWhat sort of books are they you have, m’lady?”
    â€œThey belonged to my poor husband, Mr. Conroy. That’s all he left me in the world, what you see there. He kept them himself; every stroke is in his own handwriting. He ran a little stationery shop in Brooklyn the last nineteen years of his life. We lived behind the shop. We didn’t make a fortune out of it, but we got along. He had no head for business, but he enjoyed keeping his books. I look into them when I’m in the dumps. They remind me of so much; it’s like as if I was reading his diary. He put down everything pertaining to the shop. Ah, it brings it all back, reading these old books.”
    â€œMight I see one of them, m’lady? I enjoy sums.”
    â€œIndeed you may, indeed you may!” Mrs. Conroy cried. Betty made a step toward the case, but the old lady was there before her, and lifted out a volume, dated Nov. 1899–May 1900, and handed it to her.
    â€œThe first year we were in the shop,” she said. “Liza wasn’t born then. She appeared in 1913, the only one we had.”
    Betty turned the pages of the book. “I always had a fancy for a little shop of my own somewhere,” she said. “If I ever got enough money saved. Ah, I suppose I’ll never have it, but it does no harm to think of it. I’d like to look at these, Mrs. Conroy. It’s not hard, he has it all down nice and easy.”
    â€œOh, it wasn’t mathematics that interested my poor Alfred,” Mrs. Conroy said. “Only, he liked to feel he was being businesslike. He loved marking things down. ‘My simple arithmetic,’ he used to call it. ‘I’m doing my simple arithmetic,’ he’d say when I asked him what he was up to.”
    â€œI do like working sums, m’lady,” Betty said. “I was always a great hand at addition and subtraction. I often thought I’d have been good in a bank, only I never got the chance. Would you let me borrow this for a day or two? I’ll bring you up a cup of tea, ifyou like.”
    Mrs. Conroy regarded her for a moment. “Of course I’ll let you borrow it,” she said at last. “But I’ll come down for the tea, if you don’t mind.”
    Betty touched the bookcase. “Maybe I’d better take the first two or three, m’lady,” she said. “That way I wouldn’t have to be disturbing you so often.”
    A strong old arm came up and knocked her hand away. “One at a time, Betty. This room isn’t going to feel the same with even that one missing. Mr. Conroy spent six months of his life on every one of these books. There’s two to a year. It’s going to take you a month anyway to get through that one. Now we’ll go down and have our tea, nice and cozy by the fire. I won’t bother you. I’ll just enjoy the tea and you can enjoy your book, but mind you make no marks on it. And maybe you’d better make a fresh pot of tea. It’ll have got cold, standing there all this time.”
    They had been sitting in the kitchen for some time when Betty looked up from her book. “You opened the shop November 15th, m’lady. That’s the day Mr. Conroy starts here. And on December 22nd, m’lady, you went into the shop, went through all the Christmas numbers of the magazines, and left blue marks all over them.”
    â€œIndeed, I remember the day,” Mrs. Conroy said cheerfully. “I had just finished making a blueberry pie for his dinner, and I didn’t take the time to wash my hands. Oh, he was angry when he came to sell one of those magazines and had to mark down the price!”
    â€œWith good reason he was angry, m’lady,” Betty said grimly. “And the place just started and not making money yet. Do you know how much money he lost with your