lived for ten difficult days with the grief-stricken girl and a brow-beaten nurse in attendance, with Luke Manders coming in at night to lift him capably when his position became unbearable, and Miss Ada Tenafee calling conscientiously to inquire every afternoon on her way home from school.

Remorsefully, he laid before his daughter the nakedness of their land. “But it doesn’t matter, Dad, dear,” she comforted him. “I always expected to work; you know I did. It doesn’t matter; nothing matters but you!” Her voice broke on the words but she did not cry. She bore herself, from the moment that he was carried into the house, crushed and broken, until he was carried out of it for the last[50] time, with the same composure she had exhibited on the night of Luke Mander’s exodus from his mountains. She was, after all, the man told himself with satisfaction and pride, his child; the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie had been merely the mild receptacle for her embryonic stage; directly she was born, she was triumphantly his, and his child would make her way in the world against any mischance.

[50]

She planned with him, steadily: she would leave school and go to business college at once, and fit herself for a job as expeditiously as possible, so as not to draw upon her tiny capital any more than was absolutely necessary. The house, he insisted, she must keep; it would not bring enough to make its sale worth while, and it was a shelter; he didn’t want her knocking round in boarding places. He thought she might rent some of the rooms to school-teachers or decent women of some sort; he didn’t want her there alone, of course.

Glen opened her mouth to say that she would try to coax Miss Ada from her solitary little room, but stopped herself in time; it would only have irritated him. “Yes, Dad; I can get some one, surely, and I will. I promise you I won’t stay alone. You mustn’t worry, Dad!”

He told her, clumsily, since praise came unhandily to his lips, what she had meant to him, and his earnest hope that she would be true to the creeds[51] and convictions he had set up for her. Jerkily, pausing often to rest and husband his fast-failing strength, he renewed for her the standards he had given her in her childhood, particularly on the day of the ill-starred valentine party, when she had gone to drive with him after that tragic festivity. She was to remember always that she was as good as any, and better than most; she was to be the champion of the weak—as represented by the mountaineers and the mill people—and she was to pick her friends from among them; she was to “hate’n 

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