might easily have broken her leg. That's what made me jump out of the buggy to go after them, because I thought they needed a lesson, but I jumped on one of their infernal stones and it turned my foot and that's how I twisted my ankle. So I got back into the buggy, and was glad I didn't have far to go to get to it. Then I came on home. I never knew that walk from the street to the front door was so long."

"But your face--?"

"Oh, that was one of the stones that flew wide of the mark. The little heathen don't know how to throw straight. They ought to be kept under an apple-tree with nothing to eat until they learn how to bring down their dinner with the first throw."

Leslie clenched her hands.

"It is outrageous. I don't see how you can treat it so lightly. That they should dare to stone you,--to try deliberately to hurt you, perhaps to kill you! Oh, they would never dare if it were not for this shameful, unendurable, wicked persecution!"

"Leslie, after the example which I have always carefully given you of moderation in language,--"

"It is wicked. It is unendurable. I feel as though I were in a net that was drawing closer and closer about me. It is the secrecy of it that makes me wild. If I could only fight back! But to have some one watching in the dark, and not to know who or what it is,--to suspect everybody,--"

"Leslie, don't you realize that Dr. Burton will think you delirious if you talk like this? If you are jealous of my temporary prominence as an interesting patient,--"

Leslie turned swiftly to Burton.

"My father has been made the object of a most infamous persecution by some unknown person. The most outrageous stories are circulated about him, the most unjustifiable things are done,--like this. Those children don't go around stoning people in general; they have been put up to it by some one who is always watching a chance,--some one who has used them as an instrument for his malice!"

"You must make some allowance for the intemperate zeal of a daughter, Dr. Burton," said Dr. Underwood. A twinge of pain twisted his smile into a grimace. He had a wide, flexible mouth, and when he grinned he looked a caricature. Burton reflected that a man must be sustained by an unusually strong consciousness of virtue to risk his character on such a grin,--or else it was the very 

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