another girl might know that she was going to college after she finished high school, or a third, that her aunt would take her abroad when she was eighteen.

She knew it, that was all, in a grave preoccupation, in a certain serene young sense of dedication. The thing was settled; it hadn’t to be worried about. It would have been amusing to an observer in possession of the facts to see how sedulously both her father and Miss Ada Tenafee avoided all discussion, all mention even, of such a possibility—the man,[48] because he desired it so heartily and feared to frustrate his hopes by forcing, and the woman because she turned from the idea with all the inhibitions of her caste and type, and was craftily aware that opposition would fan the flame.

[48]

It was, therefore, a wordlessly understood thing between the doctor and his daughter during the remainder of his life, but he became vocal about it on his profane and painful deathbed. He was hotly and bitterly rebellious at being obliged to die at forty-eight. His heedless habits of finance would leave her pitifully poor: beyond the dull house on the dull street, midway between The Hill and the mills, there would be something under two thousand dollars. Glen would have to leave high school in her final year and go to business college, and to work. Glenwood Darrow had always told himself that presently he would turn over a new leaf, force collections, invoke the law on long outstanding accounts, set his affairs in order and assure the girl’s future.... The automobile accident put a sudden and gory period to his plans.

He had been persuaded, after long delay, to give up his elderly horse and his battered buggy and buy a machine, and—once he had been actually won over—the salesman and demonstrator found him juvenilely enthusiastic and a quick if careless and cocksure pupil. The demonstrator found that his store[49] of bright and steady patience would not be heeded in this case: the doctor said—“Yes, yes! I get you! All right! All right, I say—Good God, man, do I look like a half-wit?”—at the end of the second lesson and refused a third. He came back from his third attempt with broken bumper and bent fenders, and a chuckling delight in his achievement, though he absolutely refused to take Glen with him until he’d “got the hang of the fool thing in a little better,” and from his fourth trip he was brought home in the ambulance he had summoned so many times for others, and cursed for its tardiness and its meager comforts.

[49]

He 

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