initial commit of ebook 15093HEADmain

1 files changed, 5179 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/15093.txt b/15093.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9985161
--- /dev/null
+++ b/15093.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5179 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Phyllis, by Maria Thompson Daviess,
+Illustrated by Percy D. Johnson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Phyllis
+
+Author: Maria Thompson Daviess
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2005  [eBook #15093]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHYLLIS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Garcia and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team from page images generously made available
+by the Kentuckiana Digital Library (http://kdl.kyvl.org/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 15093-h.htm or 15093-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/0/9/15093/15093-h/15093-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/0/9/15093/15093-h.zip)
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through the Kentuckiana
+      Digital Library Electronic Text Collection. See
+      http://kdl.kyvl.org/cgi/t/text/text-idx?;page=simpleext
+
+
+
+
+PHYLLIS
+
+by
+
+MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS
+
+Author of _The Tinder Box_, _The Melting of Molly_, etc.
+
+With Illustrations by Percy D. Johnson
+
+New York
+The Century Co.
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Down that garden path I flew]
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+HELENA RUTH KETCHAM
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Down that garden path I flew (Frontispiece)
+
+Then Roxanne and the bottle and I all collapsed on the grass together
+
+He stood there in the doorway and laughed until his big shoulders shook
+
+I never saw my father's face so lovely
+
+Tony ... nosed almost every inch of the shed
+
+He just moaned he was making an explosion
+
+The Colonel handed me the medal
+
+"You stand right here and tell me how it all looks"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The country is so much larger than the city and so empty that you
+rattle around in it until you wonder if you are ever going to get
+stuck to any place, especially if there isn't a house numbered
+anywhere. Our street is named Providence Road and the house Byrd
+Mansion and I am afraid I'll never be at home there as long as I live.
+But the doctor says Mother has to live in the country for always, and
+I'm only glad it isn't any countrier than Byrdsville.
+
+The worst thing about it to me is that this house I live in and the
+town I live in are named for the lovely dark-eyed girl who lives down
+in the old-fashioned cottage that backs up on our garden. She moved
+out for me to move in, just because I am rich and she is poor. I can't
+look at her straight, but I love her so that I can hardly stand it.
+All the other girls in school love her too, and she is not at all
+afraid of the boys, but treats them just as if they were human beings
+and could be loved as such. That awful long-legged Tony walks home
+with her almost every day and they all laugh and have a good time.
+
+I always wait until everybody has gone down the street with everybody
+else so they won't see how lonesome I am. Crowded lonesomeness is the
+worst of all. There are many nice boys and girls just about my age
+here in Byrdsville; but they can never like me. I'm glad I found it
+out before I tried to be friends with any of them. The first day I
+came to the Byrd Academy I heard Belle tell Mamie Sue how to treat me,
+and that is what settled me into this alone state.
+
+"Of course, be polite to her, Mamie Sue," Belle said, not knowing that
+I was behind the hat-rack, pinning on my hat. "But there never was a
+millionaire in Byrdsville before, and I don't see how a girl who is
+that rich can be really nice. The Bible says that it is harder for a
+rich man to get to heaven than for a knitting-needle to stick into a
+camel, because he and it are blunt, I suppose; and it must be just the
+same with such a rich girl. Poor child, I am so sorry for her; but we
+must be very careful."
+
+"Why, Belle," said Mamie Sue, in a voice that is always so comfortable
+because she is nice and fat, "Roxy said she was going to like her a
+lot, and she's got Roxy's lovely house while Roxy has to live in the
+cottage, which is just as bad as moving into a chicken coop after the
+Byrd Mansion. If Roxy likes her, it seems to me we might. She didn't
+turn us out of house and home, as the almanac says."
+
+"Don't you see that Roxy has to be nice to her, because if she isn't
+we will think it is spite about the house? Roxy can't show her
+resentment, but her friends can. I'm a friend."
+
+Belle uses words and talks like a grown person in a really wonderful
+way. She is the smartest girl in the rhetoric class and, of course,
+she knows more than most people, and Mamie Sue realizes that. So do I.
+I saw just how they all felt about me, and I don't blame them--but I
+just wish every time Roxanne Byrd smiles at me that I didn't have to
+make myself stop and remember that she does it because she has to.
+
+"But I believe Phyllis is a nice girl," Mamie Sue said. Mamie Sue
+reminds me of a nice, fat molasses drop, with her yellow hair and
+always a brown dress on.
+
+"The city is an awful wicked place, Mamie Sue, even if it is only just
+a hundred miles away. Let's don't think about the poor thing." Belle
+answered positively, and they went out of the door.
+
+I wanted to sit down and cry as I feel sure any girl has a right to
+do; only I never have learned how to do it. Crying with only a
+governess to listen to and reprove a person is no good at all; only
+mothers can make crying any comfort, and mine is too feeble to let me
+do anything but tiptoe in and hold her hand while the nurse watches me
+and the clock to send me out. Fathers just stiffen girls' backbones
+instead of encouraging wet eyelashes--at least that is the way mine
+affects me.
+
+No, I didn't sit down and cry when I found out that I wasn't to have
+any friends in Byrdsville for the just cause of being too rich, but I
+stiffened my mind to bear it as a rich man's daughter ought to bear
+her father's mistakes in conduct.
+
+What made me know that the girls had the right view of the question
+was what I had found out about it for myself this spring from reading
+magazines, and I have been distressed and uneasy about Father ever
+since. His own cousin, Gilmore Lewis, who is a fine man, as everybody
+knows and as is often published, runs one of the greatest weekly
+magazines in New York, and he put a piece in it that would have proved
+to a child in the second reader how wicked it is to be millionaire
+men. Father's name was not mentioned, but many of his friends' were,
+and of course I knew that it was just courtesy of his Cousin Gilmore
+to leave it out.
+
+I know it is all wrong, with so many poor people and starvation at
+every hand. I see that! But in spite of his terrible habit of making
+money I love and trust my father and expect to keep on doing it. He
+understands me as well as a man can understand a girl, and he is
+regardful for me always. He looked at me for a long time one night a
+week before he moved down here in this Harpeth Valley, where the air
+is to keep Mother a little longer for us to know she's here even if we
+can't always see her every day, and then he said:
+
+"Phil, old girl, I'm not going to take Miss Rogers with us to go on
+with your solitary brand of education. There is a little one-horse
+school in Byrdsville that they call the Byrd Academy, and I watched a
+bunch of real human boys and girls go in the gate the morning I got
+there. I think you will have to be one of them. I want to see a few
+hayseeds sprinkled over your very polished surface."
+
+I laughed with him. That is the good thing about Father: you can
+always laugh with him, even if you are not sure what you are laughing
+about. Laughing _at_ a person is just as rude as eating an apple
+right in his face. Father always divides his apple. Though rich, he is
+a really noble man.
+
+But although I didn't cry when I heard Belle talking a course of
+righteous action into fat Mamie Sue about me, I made up my mind that I
+would have to have some sort of person to talk to, so I bought this
+book. I am going to call it "Louise" and do as good a stunt of
+pretending that it has got brown hair and blue eyes and a real heart
+as I can. All I have written up to now has just been introducing
+myself to Louise. Our real adventures and conversations will come
+later.
+
+Before I have gone to bed all this week I have been taking a peep out
+of my window down over the back garden to Roxanne Byrd's cottage and
+asking her in my heart to forgive me for taking her home, and asking
+God to make her love the cottage as I would like to be let to love
+her. To think that I have to sleep in her great-grandmother's
+four-poster bed that Roxanne has always slept in! I have to pray hard
+to be forgiven for it and to be able to endure the doing of it.
+Good-night!
+
+This has been a very curious and happy kind of day, Louise, and I feel
+excited and queer. I have had a long talk with Roxanne Byrd over our
+garden fence, and she is just as wonderful as I thought she was going
+to be. A person's dream about another person is so apt to be a kind of
+misfit, but Roxanne slipped into mine about her just as if it had been
+made for her.
+
+The little Byrd boy is named Lovelace Peyton for his two grandfathers,
+and he looks and sounds just like he had come out of a beautiful book;
+but he doesn't act accordingly. He is slim and rosy and dimply, with
+yellow curls just mopped all over his head, and he has blue eyes the
+color that the sky is hardly ever; but from what Roxanne says about
+him I hardly see how he will live to grow up. He falls in and sits in
+and down and on and breaks and eats things in the most terrible
+fashion, and he has all sorts of creeps and crawls in his pocket all
+of the time. He pulls bugs and worms apart and tries to put them
+together again; and he choked the old rooster nearly to death trying
+to poke down his throat some bread and mud made up into pills.
+
+That is what I ran to help Roxanne about, and the poor old chicken was
+gaping and gasping terribly. I held him while she made Lovelace Peyton
+put his finger down in the bill and pull up the wad he had been trying
+to push down.
+
+"That old rooster have got rheumatiz, Roxy, and now he'll die with no
+pill for it," said Lovelace, as he worked his dirty little finger down
+after the mud and bread; but he got it out and the poor old chicken
+hopped off with all his feathers ruffled up and stretching his neck as
+if to try it.
+
+"Oh, Lovey, please don't kill the chickens," Roxanne said in a tone of
+real pleading.
+
+"I don't never kill nothing, Roxy," he answered indignantly. "If a
+thing can't get well from me doctoring it, it dies 'cause it wants to.
+Since Uncle Pomp let me put that mixtry of nice mud and brick dust on
+his shoe he don't suffer with his frost-bit heel no more. He's going
+to stop limping next week if I put it on every day. I'm going to pound
+another piece of brick right now," and he went around the house with
+the darlingest little lope, because he always rides a stick horse,
+which prances most of the time.
+
+"Oh, isn't he awful?" said Roxanne; but there was the kind of pride in
+her voice and the kind of look in her eyes that I would have if I had
+a little brother like that, even if he was so dirty that he would have
+to be handled with tongs.
+
+"He's so awful I wish he was mine," I answered, and then we both
+laughed.
+
+I had never thought, leather Louise, that I would have a nice laugh
+like that with a girl who was only treating me kindly to keep from the
+sin of spite. It was hard to believe that Roxanne didn't really like
+me when she went on to tell me some of the dreadful funny things
+Lovelace Peyton does almost every hour. I forgot about her feeling for
+me and was laughing at her description of how she came home from
+school one day and found old Uncle Pompey, who is as black and old as
+a human being can be and is all the servant Roxanne has to help her,
+cooking dinner with a piece of newspaper pasted in strips all over his
+face, which was Lovelace Peyton's remedy for neuralgia.
+
+But just as I was enjoying myself so as to be almost unconscious I saw
+Belle and Mamie Sue and Tony Luttrell coming around the corner of the
+street past the front gate of Byrd Mansion and down toward the
+cottage. Nobody knows how hard it is for me to see every nice body my
+own age pass right by my gate in a procession to see Roxanne when I
+can't go, too.
+
+Tony didn't see me standing by the garden fence, and he gave the funny
+little whistle that he calls the Raccoon whistle for the Palefaces and
+which he always whistles when he wants to signal something to one of
+the girls. Then suddenly they all saw me, and that politely enduring
+look came over all three faces at once, though Mamie Sue's face is so
+jolly and round by nature that it is very hard to prim it down
+suddenly, and I don't believe she would always trouble to put it on
+for me, only Belle seems to demand it of her as an echo of her
+sentiments toward me. Some people can't seem to be sure of themselves
+unless they can get somebody else to echo them and I think that is why
+Belle has to keep poor Mamie Sue at her elbow all the time.
+
+But when I saw the politeness plaster spread itself over all their
+faces at the sight of me enjoying myself like any other girl, I just
+turned away wearily and started back along my own garden path, back to
+my own house which I felt that I ought not to be living in. But
+something sweet happened to me before I left that makes me feel nice
+and warm even now to think about.
+
+"Please don't go away, Phyllis," said Roxanne, looking right into my
+face with such a lovely look in her own eyes that it was almost
+impossible, for an instant, for me to believe it was charity.
+
+For a moment I wanted to stay, and almost did; but if she could be
+generous, so could I, and I didn't intend to spoil their fun for even
+a minute, so I just smiled at her and bowed to them as I walked away.
+
+Nobody knows how it does hurt me to be this kind of an outcast! I have
+lived fifteen years with a sick mother, and a governess and trained
+nurses, and never a chance of having friends; and now that one is just
+at my back door I can't have her because useless wealth is between us.
+Is there no way the rich can turn poor without disgrace? But I've got
+that smile from Roxanne and I'm going to believe it was meant for the
+real me. Good-night!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+I'm so full of happiness and scare and a secret that if I didn't have
+this little book to spill some of it out to I don't know what I would
+do. A secret sometimes makes a girl feel like she would explode worse
+than a bottle of nitroglycerin, though it makes me nervous even to
+write the word when I think of what might have happened to Lovelace
+Peyton if I hadn't had a father who is cool enough to keep his head at
+all times and handed that quality down to me.
+
+Tony Luttrell is the leader of the Raccoon Patrol of the Boy Scouts,
+and he has a star for pulling Pink Chadwell out of the swimming-pool
+one day last summer when Pink had eaten too many green apples and the
+cold water gave him cramps. Tony had to hit him on the head to keep
+them both from being drowned. It was a grand thing for him to do, and
+everybody in this town looks up to Tony as a hero. Roxanne says the
+thing that hurts her most is that she can't tell all the boys and
+girls how brave I am because of the secret which I had to find out
+when I saved the life of Lovelace Peyton.
+
+"Oh, Phyllis, to think they can't all know what a noble girl you are
+to risk your life, when you knew it, to get Lovey out for me," Roxanne
+said, after we had locked things up and got Lovelace to promise never
+to go near that window again and were sitting on the little back porch
+of the cottage trembling with fear and being very happy together.
+
+"I don't care what they think about me, Roxanne, just so you will be
+my friend sometimes in private when the others are not around," I
+said, in a voice that wanted to tremble, but I wouldn't let it.
+
+"Do you think I would do a thing like that, Phyllis--be a girl's
+friend in private?" Roxanne asked, and her head went up into a
+stiff-necked pose like that portrait of her great-grandmother Byrd
+that looks so haughtily out of place hanging over the fireplace in the
+living hall in the little old cottage, in spite of the room full of
+old mahogany furniture and silver candlesticks brought from Byrd
+Mansion to keep her company. "I'm going to be your friend all the
+time, and it is none of the others' business. I have always wanted to
+be, but you were so stiff with me; and Belle said she felt that you
+had so many friends out in the world, where you have traveled, that
+you wouldn't want us."
+
+If I had answered what I wanted to about Belle Kirby, I should have
+been very much ashamed by this time. Like a flash it came over me that
+it would be a poor way to begin being friends with Roxanne to make her
+see what a freak one of her best friends was, so I held the explosion
+back.
+
+"She was mistaken, Roxanne," I said; and I couldn't help being a
+little sad as I spoke the truth out to her, for I am fifteen years
+old, and fifteen are a good many years to live lonely. "I haven't any
+friends in all the world. We have traveled everywhere trying to get
+mother well, but I've had no chance to make friends. This is the first
+time a girl ever talked to me in my life, and I never did talk to a
+boy--and I never want to."
+
+"Oh, Phyllis, how dreadful!" said Roxanne; and she gave me such a hug
+around the neck that it hurt awfully, only I liked it. It did feel
+funny to have somebody sniffing tears of sympathy against your cheek,
+and I didn't know exactly what to do. Petting has to be learned by
+degrees and you can't come to it suddenly. But I was happy.
+
+And I'm happier to-night than I ever was in my life, only still scared
+quite a little, too. I wonder how the boys and girls are going to like
+Roxanne's being friends with me. How can they hate me if I haven't
+ever done anything to them? It makes me nervous to think about it, and
+that combined with the secret and the accident that didn't happen to
+Lovelace Peyton make my writing so shaky that I may never be able to
+read it.
+
+This is the accident and the secret. Of course, I knew that there
+never was such a glorious person born in the world as Roxanne's grown
+brother, Mr. Douglass Byrd, but I didn't know what kind of a genius he
+was. It was something of a shock to find out, for I felt sure he was a
+wonderful poet that the world was waiting to hear sing forth. That is
+what he looks like. He's tall and slim except his shoulders, which are
+almost as broad as father's, and his eyes are the night-sky kind that
+seem to shine because they can't help it. His smile is as sweet as
+Roxanne's, only the saddest I ever saw; and his hair mops in curls
+like Lovelace Peyton's, only it is black, and he won't let it. This
+description could fit a great artist or a novelist or an orator, but
+he isn't even any of these; he's an inventor.
+
+The invention has something to do with the pig iron out at the
+Cumberland Iron Furnaces that father owns in the Harpeth Valley, and
+Mr. Douglass works for him. It turns it into steel sooner than anybody
+else has ever discovered how to do it before, and it is such a
+wonderful invention that it will make so much money for him and his
+family that they won't know what to do with it. Roxanne is going to
+tell me more about it to-morrow.
+
+I didn't say anything to keep Roxanne from being happy over her
+brother getting all that money, but it made me sad. The more money you
+get the less happiness there seems to be on the market to buy. All
+Father's dollars couldn't have bought me even one of those hugs around
+the neck from Roxanne--I had to risk my life to get them. And that's
+where Lovelace Peyton and his badness come in. I'm catching my breath
+as I think about it.
+
+Mr. Douglass has a little shed down in the cottage garden boxed off to
+make his experiments in. He keeps it locked up with a padlock, and has
+commanded that nobody is to go even near the door. There is one big
+bottle that has some kind of nitroglycerin mixture in it that is going
+to blow the iron into steel while it is hot, he hopes. Roxanne knows
+it because he showed it to her, and he told her if the cottage ever
+got on fire to run and get it and carry it carefully away first before
+it could blow up the town. It must never be jolted in any way. She has
+a key to the shed that she guards sacredly.
+
+If there is one thing in the world that Lovelace Peyton wants worse
+than any other, it is bottles. He takes every one he can find and just
+begs for more. He has a place down by the garden wall, behind a
+chicken coop, where he makes his mixtures and keeps all the bottles.
+He's going to be a famous surgeon and doctor some day if he lives,
+which I now think is doubtful.
+
+I was down in my garden on the other side of the wall from him picking
+some leaves off the lavender bushes Roxanne's great-grandmother had
+planted in that lovely old garden, which is so full of Roxanne's
+ancestral flowers that it grieves me to think I have to own them
+instead of her. I haven't been letting myself go down there often,
+because I was afraid she would suspect how much I wanted her to come
+out and talk to me like she did the day of Lovelace Peyton's rooster
+excitement; but sometimes I think my dignity ought to let me go and
+pick just a little of the lavender, and I go. I went this afternoon,
+and I believe God sent me and so does Roxanne.
+
+Suddenly, as I bent over the bushes picking, I heard a wail in
+Roxanne's sweet voice and I looked up quick. There she stood in the
+back door, as white as a pocket handkerchief, shuddering and pointing
+to me to look down at the end of the garden right near me.
+
+"Oh, Phyllis," she chattered through her shaking teeth just so I could
+hear it, "if he drops that big bottle, the whole town will be blown to
+pieces. How can we save it and him?"
+
+And when I looked and saw Lovelace Peyton, I began to shudder too. He
+was hanging half in and half out of a little window high up in the
+shed like a skylight, and the big bottle was slowly slipping as he
+tried to wriggle either in or out. There was no ladder in sight, and
+neither of us was near tall enough to reach him. He was beginning to
+whimper and be scared himself, and I could see the heavy bottle start
+to slip faster from his arm. We had less than a second to lose. I
+thought and prayed both at the same time, which I find is a good thing
+to do in such times of danger. You haven't got time to do them
+separately. The idea came! I have had lots of teaching by different
+gymnasium teachers wherever we happened to live for a few months, and
+I'm as strong as most boys. I know how to do things with myself like
+boys do.
+
+"Hold your bottle tight, Lovelace Peyton; don't let it fall; it'll be
+good for mixing in and I can get you loose," I called as I scrambled
+over the wall and met Roxanne just under the window. I saw him hug it
+up tight again as he stopped squirming.
+
+"Quick, Roxanne, step on my shoulder," I told her; and I bent down and
+held up my hand to her.
+
+"Oh, can you hold me up, Phyllis?" she gasped; but she put her foot on
+my right shoulder and, leaning against the wall, I pulled myself up
+little by little, holding her hand while she clung to the wall to
+balance herself.
+
+"Keep still, Lovey, just a minute longer," she said shakily. "Just an
+inch more, Phyllis," she whispered to me; and, though I was almost
+strained to death, I stretched another inch. Then I heard her give a
+sob and I knew she had the bottle.
+
+But even if she did have the bottle we had to get it down without a
+jar, and I was giving way in every bone in my body. But I thought of
+Napoleon Bonaparte and Gen. Robert E. Lee and braced a minute longer
+as Roxanne climbed down over me with that horrible bottle in her arms.
+
+[Illustration: Then Roxanne and the bottle and I all collapsed on the
+grass together]
+
+Then Roxanne and the bottle and I all collapsed on the grass together;
+and if we had known how, I think the poetic thing for us to have done
+was to have fainted. But we did know how to giggle and shake at the
+same time, and that is what we did until Lovelace Peyton howled so
+loud we had to begin to get him down. And the getting him loose took
+us a nice long time that was very good for him. We had to get the key
+and unlock the shed and get a table and a chair on both the inside and
+outside, and Roxanne pushed while I pulled. We tore him and his
+clothes both a great deal, but at last we landed him. Then Roxanne put
+him to bed to punish him and to mend his dress at the same time. That
+was when she told me the great secret that it is hurting me to keep,
+because it has got my Father mixed up in it in a sort of conspiracy
+like you read about in books. I don't dare write it even to you,
+leather Louise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Changing a lifelong principle is almost as difficult as wearing new
+shoes that don't exactly fit you, and it makes you feel just as
+awkward and limp in mind as the shoes do in feet. Still I believe in
+adopting new ideas. I have never liked the appearance of boys, and I
+never supposed that when you knew one it would be a pleasant
+experience; but in the case of Tony Luttrell it is, and in the case of
+Pink Chadwell it is almost so.
+
+I don't know what Roxanne said to them all to explain her relations of
+friendship with the heathen--myself--but it was funny to see how they
+tried to please her by seeming to like me, only Tony didn't _seem_. He
+offered me himself as a friend along with all the bites I cared to
+take off the other side of a huge apple he was eating. I took the
+bites and Tony at the same time with fear and trembling, but my
+confidence in him grows every day. It grows in Pink, also, only much
+more slowly.
+
+Tony is long-legged and colty looking, with such a wide mouth and
+laughing kind of eyes that the corners of your own mouth go up when
+you look at him, and he raises a giggle in your inside by just a funny
+kind of flare his eyes have got; but Pink Chadwell is different. Poor
+Pink is so handsome that he is pitiful about it. He carries a bottle
+of water in his pocket to keep the curl of his front hair sopped out,
+but he can't keep his lovely skin from having those pink cheeks. Tony
+calls him "Rosebud" when he sees that he has got used to hearing
+himself called "Pinkie" and is a little happy.
+
+The surprise to me was that the boys were so much nicer to me than the
+girls when Roxanne adopted me; but then it didn't make so much
+difference to them. The girls are always together in all of the
+important things of their lives, while most of the time the boys just
+forget all about us, unless they need us for something or we get ahead
+of them in class.
+
+"I'm so glad that you are going to stay and have lunch with us
+to-day," Belle said to me the first time I let Roxanne beg me into
+bringing my lunch instead of going home for it, as I had been doing
+every day to keep from seeming to be so alone, eating all by myself
+while they had spread theirs all together out on the side porch or
+even out on the big flat stone when it was warm enough. "When Roxy
+wanted to invite you, I felt sure you wouldn't come."
+
+Some people have a way of freezing up all the pleasure that they can
+get close enough to talk over. Belle is that kind. She made me so
+uncomfortable that I was about to do some freezing on my own account
+when Mamie Sue lumbered into the conversation in such a nice, friendly
+way that I laughed instead.
+
+"I hope you brought a lot of food, for I'm good and hungry to-day,"
+she said. "I ate so many biscuits for breakfast that I left myself
+only five to bring for lunch. Our cook makes the same number every day
+and I just see-saw my lunch and breakfast in a very uncomfortable way.
+So many biscuits for breakfast, so few for lunch!" That jolly, plump
+laugh of Mamie Sue's is going to save some kind of a serious situation
+yet, friend leather Louise.
+
+If you are the kind of person that has dumb love for your friends, you
+see more about them than folks who can express themselves on the
+sacred subject. That lunch party with those five jolly girls out in
+the side yard of the Byrd Academy gave me a funny, uneasy feeling, and
+I now know the reason. Roxanne Byrd brought one small apple, two very
+thin biscuits, and some cracked hickory nuts. She carefully ate less
+than she brought. Something took my appetite when I saw her eat so
+little, and there was a quantity of food left for somebody to consume,
+and _she_ hungry. I was afraid we'd have to send for a doctor for
+Mamie Sue after she had cleared my large napkin we spread to put it
+all on. The Jamison biscuits are cut on the same plump pattern that
+Mamie Sue is and all my sandwiches were good and thick.
+
+But when Roxanne didn't eat I suffered. One of the most awful
+situations in life is to have one of your friends be the sort of girl
+that has a town named after her and wonderful family portraits and
+such dainty hands and feet that shabby shoes don't even count, and
+then to know that she is hungry most of the time from being too poor
+to get enough food. For two days I have had to keep my mind off
+Roxanne Byrd to make myself swallow one single morsel of anything to
+eat. I suspected it at the school lunch but I was certain of it from
+the way Lovelace Peyton consumed the first cooky I offered him over
+the fence. Thank goodness, he has no family pride located in his
+stomach, and when my feelings overcome me he is the outlet. I can feed
+him anything at all hours and he is always ready for more. It may be
+wrong to keep it from his sister when I know how she feels about it,
+but I can't help that. I have to fill him up. His legs look too empty
+for me.
+
+But, to do Lovelace Peyton justice, he has got his own kind of pride,
+and I understand it better than I do Roxanne's.
+
+"For these nice eatings, I'll cut a cat open for nothing and let you
+see inside what makes him go, if you get the cat," he offered, after
+he had eaten two slices of buttered bread and the breast of half a
+chicken out behind one of the lilac bushes in his ancestral garden
+that is now mine.
+
+Now, I call that a fair proposition, considering the circumstances,
+and I wish I could make Roxanne be as sensible in spirit. But I can't.
+Family pride is a terrible thing, like lunacy or hysterics when a
+person gets it bad.
+
+However, I decided to talk to Roxanne about her financial situation,
+and I began as far off from the subject as I could, so as to approach
+it with caution.
+
+I made a start with a compliment. A sincere compliment is a good way
+to start being disagreeable to a person for her own benefit.
+
+"Roxanne," I said, with decided palpitation in my heart that I kept
+out of my voice, "you didn't know, did you, that you are one
+fifteen-year-old wonder, done up in a feminine edition with curls and
+dark eyes? How do you manage it all?"
+
+"I'm not, and I don't," answered Roxanne with a laugh as she drew a
+long needle across a mammoth darn she was making on the knee of a
+stocking which was quite as small as the darn was large. "I don't
+manage at all; everybody will tell you so. Miss Prissy Talbot says she
+can't get to sleep at night until twelve o'clock because she has to
+pray about so many things that might happen to us poor forlorns if she
+didn't. I am mighty thankful to her, for I don't have time to pray
+much. I am so tired when I go to bed. I just say 'God, you know,' and
+go to sleep. He understands, 'cause Miss Prissy has told him all about
+it beforehand."
+
+"I just guess He does--without Miss Talbot's telling Him either," I
+answered as I came and sat on the front steps beside Roxanne. "And
+another thing, Roxanne--I--er, I don't quite know how to say it--but
+you--you talk like you are--that is, you seem to be friends with God
+just like you are with Tony Luttrell and Belle and Miss Prissy and the
+Colonel--and me," I continued with embarrassment.
+
+"I am," answered Roxanne, with beautiful positiveness. "I decided to
+have Him for one of my friends 'most two years ago after Father and
+Mother died almost together. When Douglass told me that we would have
+to sell Byrd Mansion and move down here in this old cottage that had
+been great-grandfather's gardener's house, with only Uncle Pompey to
+help me take care of it and him and Lovelace Peyton, he asked me if I
+couldn't stand by. I held my head up just as high as great-grandmother
+Byrd does in her portrait and said: 'Yes!' 'Then God help you,' he
+said, and he hugged me up under his chin. Then we all moved; and God
+_has_ helped."
+
+"He must have," I answered devoutly, meaning what I said. And as I
+spoke something in me was loosened and I felt a wonderful difference
+about God. The God that a governess explains out of a book to you and
+the One that really comes down and helps a girl friend so that she can
+speak of Him with confidence as a friend, are two distinct people. I
+am going to feel about Him as Roxanne does and speak of Him when I
+want to and write about Him to you, Louise, just as I do about all of
+the other interesting inhabitants of Byrdsville.
+
+"Oh," laughed Roxanne, as she snipped a thread and began to
+cross-stitch the mammoth cavern, never dreaming of the momentous
+resolve she was interrupting in my heart, "it is not so bad this year,
+because Lovey has got so nice and steady on his feet and doesn't put
+things in his mouth any more. Now he is so busy hunting and doctoring
+his 'squirms' as he calls them, that I have lots of free time to mend
+and darn and work. Of course, it is hard to have him keep them in his
+apron pocket and always carrying them in his hand when he hasn't a
+bottle that smells bad to carry. Just yesterday he brought a queer
+kind of--Oh, what do you suppose he has found now?"
+
+And with the fear and trembling that all girls have the right to feel
+of "squirms" both Roxanne and I sat petrified while Lovelace Peyton
+came around the house at full gallop and drew up in front of us on the
+brick walk. His face was streaked with mud, and in one hand he held an
+old tomato can and in another a dangerous-looking pointed stick.
+
+Lovelace Peyton is freckled and snub-nosed and patched in various
+unexpected places and his eyes were sweet like Roxanne's as they
+flared with excitement when he paused for breath before he unfolded
+his tale of the adventure from which he had just arrived.
+
+"Guess what crawl I have founded now, Roxy?" he demanded with
+confidence that sympathy would be extended him over his good-fortune.
+
+"I can't guess, Lovey, but please don't let it out," answered Roxanne
+with the expected sympathy slightly tinged with entreaty in her voice.
+I moved down one step so as to be nearer the capture, for Lovelace
+Peyton's enthusiasm was contagious.
+
+"It's a chicken sk-snake," he proclaimed proudly; and while both
+Roxanne and I tucked our feet up under our skirts and squealed, he
+drew with triumph a very fat, red fishing-worm out of the can and
+displayed it, hanging across one of his chubby fingers. "It's a lovely
+chicken-eating sk-snake," he said with breathless admiration.
+
+"Y-e-s," I said doubtfully. "But it couldn't eat a chicken very well,
+could it, Lovelace Peyton?" I asked politely, with my doubts of the
+helpless red string hanging on his finger well under control. Roxanne
+had gone back to her darning with relief plainly written all over her
+face.
+
+"This sk-snake could eat up five chickens or maybe more if you give
+him time," defended his captor warmly.
+
+"It--it looks rather small to be so savage, Lovey," argued Roxanne
+mildly as she went on darning.
+
+"It's sick some--wait till I put it in pepper tea," said Lovelace
+Peyton as he lifted the worm.
+
+"Ask Uncle Pomp what he thinks," advised Roxanne, hoping to get rid of
+the squirm.
+
+"I bet Uncle Pomp will be skeered to death of him," answered the proud
+hunter as he took his departure around the house.
+
+"Oh," sighed Roxy, "some day he will find a real snake and then what
+will I do?"
+
+"That is just what I was talking about, Roxanne," I said, returning to
+my subject, which is the way my slow, methodical mind works in direct
+contrast to Roxanne's way of forgetting one thing because of
+enthusiastic interest in the next. "I don't see how you attend to all
+of this, this--" I paused to find a name for Roxanne's tumultuous
+household.
+
+"Menagerie," Roxanne suggested, with a laugh that floated out over the
+bed of ragged red chrysanthemums as sweet and clear as the note of the
+cardinal in the tall elm by the gate.
+
+"It's how you get your lessons and stay high up in your class I don't
+understand," I answered, still using my compliment tactics. "I've only
+known you less than a month, so it might be just luck that you got
+first mention for your character sketch of Hawthorne in the rhetoric
+class; but Tony says you always get it. You recite your German poems
+like they were English, and you feel them as much as you do
+Cassabianca. When do you study?"
+
+"Never," answered Roxy with a ruthful smile; "but, Phyllis, in school
+I listen. I have to. Just school hours are all I have; but I learn
+lessons while they are being recited, and write exercises and things
+in that one free hour I have at ten o'clock. If nothing like mumps or
+whooping-cough happens to Lovey this winter or next, I believe I will
+be ready to go to college with you and Belle and Mamie Sue and Tony
+and Pink. I've asked Miss Prissy to be sure and pray away those mumps
+and whooping-cough. I could manage measles."
+
+"But you are just one girl, Roxanne, with the usual number of hands
+and feet and eyes and things," I said, with an intention of bringing
+things to the point of the embarrassing hunger. But my point was
+reached in the conversation by Roxanne herself without my being quite
+ready for it.
+
+"Yes, I know that, but for a little while I have got to be several,"
+she answered with a laugh. "Douglass has succeeded in the experiments
+out there in the back yard, but he can't be certain of the process
+until he tries it on a whole oven full of ore some night out at the
+furnaces. He just works every minute he can get, all night sometimes,
+and that is why I mend and darn and save and save--it costs so much
+for him to get the things he needs out in his shop. Of course, I never
+let Lovey or Uncle Pomp get really hungry, but Douglass and I do--that
+is--" Roxanne stopped, for the pain _would_ come out on my face.
+"Oh, Phyllis, not really hungry," she said mercifully, "but just tired
+of corn-bread and molasses. Douglass kisses me and I kiss him good-by
+in the morning and we pretend it is butter on his bread, like the poet
+said. Please don't feel bad about it, Phyllis. It was cruel for me to
+tell it when I am as happy as I can be."
+
+"Well, you'll never be hungry again while I have two feet and hands to
+'tote' food to you, as Uncle Pompey calls it," I answered with a
+masterly control of that troublesome lump in my throat that I had
+discovered for the first time since I began to love Roxanne Byrd.
+
+"I couldn't let you do that--bring me food, Phyllis," said Roxanne
+gently; and her little head with its raven black, heavy curls again
+rose to the stately pose of the Byrd great-grandmother.
+
+"I don't see why not," I answered bluntly.
+
+"Taking food and clothes would be charity, and I couldn't do that. I
+couldn't even let Miss Prissy give Lovelace Peyton any aprons, only I
+did take some scraps of her pink gingham dress to piece him
+with--that's why he looks like such a rainbow with his pink on blue.
+Please don't be mad with me, Phyllis. I don't mind at all doing
+without grand things to eat, but I can't--can't do without your--your
+love," and Roxanne hid her head on my shoulder, much to my surprise.
+
+"You'd better have my cookies and roast chicken," I muttered as I
+shook her back into her own place again.
+
+"The taste of love lasts longer than any kind of cake," answered
+Roxanne with a comforted laugh. "And truly, Phyllis, it has been a
+comfort to tell you all about it. It is hard to have to skimp like I
+do and it makes a girl nervous to have to keep looking down at her
+feet to be sure that a toe isn't poking out of the shoe since the last
+time she looked, also to know that the last inch of hem is let out of
+her dress and her legs are growing while she sleeps. I can take
+Douglass's old shirts and make shirt waists for me and aprons of the
+scraps for Lovey, and lots of things for Lovey out of his old
+trousers, only he says that he has to wear them himself until he feels
+ashamed of his appearance whenever he meets anybody; but my own skirts
+are what seem the last straw, or rather the bricks that I haven't any
+straw to make. The last one was made out of some dead Somebody Byrd's
+black cashmere shawl, I don't know whose, but I can't see the next
+even in the dim future."
+
+"I heard Belle Kirby say that your white linen is the most stylish
+dress in Byrdville, and I agreed with her," I said, with the emphasis
+that truth always makes possible. "In fact, you always look different
+from other people, Roxanne--like--like the town was named for you--as
+it is."
+
+"Oh, that linen dress is really a wonder, considering," laughed
+Roxanne with pleased delight. "It is made out of a linen sheet that
+came off one of my great-grandmother's looms, and I found it in an old
+trunk. Miss Prissy embroidered it and helped me make it and a suit for
+Lovey and a shirt for Douglass out of the other one of the pair. Uncle
+Pompey helps me wash and iron all three of them every Saturday. He has
+a necktie off of them, too, and Sunday we all go to church 'of a
+piece', he calls it. Douglass says, when the Emperor of Germany
+invites the great inventor and his family to come to court to meet the
+royal family we are all going to wear our parts of the family sheets,
+if only folded in our pockets like handkerchiefs. Sometimes in the
+middle of the night, when something goes right in the shop, Douglass
+comes in and wakes me up. I dress up in a blanket for a court dress,
+and we wake up Lovey and play our royal visit. Do you blame me for not
+minding washing and ironing and cooking and toe-poking or
+dress-shrinking with a brother who is an idol like that?"
+
+"No, Roxanne, I don't blame you. He--er--Mr. Douglass is worth it
+all," I answered with controlled emotion. I thereupon adopted the word
+"Idol" to use for him in private between you and me, good Louise. He
+deserves it. "He is so perfectly grand that I step on my own toes
+whenever I see from a long way off that I must meet him on the
+street," I continued. "I turn a corner rather than speak to him. I
+never intend to. The sight of him makes me so shy that it is agony." I
+didn't in the least mind confessing such a feeling to Roxanne, because
+she is the "Idol's"--it looks nice written--sister and will
+understand.
+
+"And all the time he is afraid that he will have to back up against a
+fence sometime to hide his patches from you," laughed Roxanne in such
+merriment that anybody with any sense of pleasant humor would have
+joined her at the thought of the Idol and me dancing a minuet to keep
+out of each other's way.
+
+The way Roxanne feels about her brother is the way I feel about Father
+even after I saw that article in the magazine. He is my father and
+nobody is wholly bad. I always will love him devotedly and go to him
+with my sorrows.
+
+At night in the study of Roxanne's forefathers, before the log fire
+where the fifth old Colonel Byrd used to entertain Andrew Jackson, I
+told him all about that terrible starving that is going on down at the
+little cottage beyond the garden.
+
+"Well," said Father, in the voice I still think so noble and good and
+that still comforts me, "we'll have to see to all that. When I bought
+this place from young Byrd, I liked him better than any youngster I
+had met in a long time, and I offered him a better place out at the
+furnaces than he could fill. I have tried to have him advanced twice,
+but the young stiffneck says he won't have more than he earns. Still
+he gets a hundred a month and things ought not to be so tight down at
+the Byrd nest. Wonder what he does with the money? He's not a gamer, I
+take it."
+
+"Oh, Father, no!" I answered, shocked that anybody should think that
+of the Idol. "It's for the experiments that all the money goes.
+Roxanne's so proud of him for the wonderful thing he has discovered
+that she will starve herself to death, and him too, before all the
+world hears about it, even the Emperor of Germany."
+
+"Experiments?" Father asked, with a quick look that he has when
+business and things interest him very much. "What experiments?"
+
+"I can't tell you that, for you're the very person not to know," I
+answered quickly, a little bit scared.
+
+"Then don't," answered Father, looking me square in the face in a way
+that I wished that magazine could have seen. "And if you have a secret
+of importance, don't ever even hint it, Phil."
+
+"I won't," I answered, glad to see that he wasn't going to ask any
+more about it all.
+
+"And, Phil," he continued, speaking slowly and looking at me as
+lovingly as any father could look at a daughter, even a poor one, "you
+go right ahead filling up the youngster and standing by the Byrds.
+That's what I want you to learn--standing-by-ness. Have the other
+'poor but prouds' thawed to you to any extent?" I had told Father some
+of the ways Belle and the others had treated me, only not so as to
+hurt his feelings about his money being the cause of it.
+
+"Some of them have and the others are going to, I think," I said, even
+more hopefully than I really felt about it.
+
+"Here's hoping," said Father, and this time he did laugh.
+
+A great resolve has come into my mind since this talk with Father. I
+am going to reform him about money-making if it takes me all my life.
+He is too good a man for God not to have in heaven. His honor must be
+saved. Amen!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Miss Priscilla Talbot might by some people be called an old maid, as
+she must be either a little before or after fifty years old; but if I
+had to invent just one word to describe her darling self it would be
+"precious."
+
+Tony Luttrell calls all of the girls collectively and singly
+"bubbles," which is both disrespectful and funny at the same time. But
+real affection in any disrespect can keep it from being at all
+wicked--and Tony's always is affectionate, especially when he insults
+Miss Priscilla by calling her Miss Bubbles right to her face. Nobody
+else dares to do it, but she likes it. It is a good thing that she is
+fifty years young instead of old, for if she wasn't I don't know what
+the Palefaces and Scouts would do without her. She lets Tony beg her
+into doing everything with us so the grown-up people, like mothers and
+fathers, will be deceived into thinking that we are being taken care
+of, while the truth is that Miss Prissy is just as much trouble for us
+to look after as Lovelace Peyton and we love her in exactly the same
+way. We also love the Colonel a great deal for her sake, and to make
+up for the way she treats him.
+
+Miss Prissy lives just next to Roxanne, on the other side, and she is
+such a comfort to her, though a great added responsibility. She
+worries so over everything that Roxanne doesn't have that it gets on
+Roxanne's nerves, as the people say when things make them cross. Not
+that Roxanne ever is cross with Miss Prissy. But I made up my mind
+after that first remonstrance that if Roxanne Byrd had the pluck to
+let herself go hungry and cold and ragged for a great proud cause like
+an inventor in the family, I was going to let her get all the fun out
+of it she could and not mope over it. I still fill up Lovelace Peyton
+so regularly that he is getting so fat I am afraid Roxanne will notice
+and suspect something. I may have to diet him soon.
+
+Roxanne and I were just talking about Miss Prissy and the poor Colonel
+out on the front steps of the cottage when there came one of the proud
+moments of my life. It's wonderful how Roxanne's enthusiasm can throw
+such a magic over her shabby shoes and the little cottage with the
+young green vines running over the eaves and old Uncle Pomp and a
+darning bag full of ragged stockings, that you want to stay feeling it
+forever and ever. It doesn't even take the rosy hue off the dream to
+talk about Lovelace Peyton.
+
+"Oh, Lovey will be a famous surgeon some day, I feel sure," Roxanne
+said, as she began on another interminable job of stocking-patching.
+"And Douglass is going to be a Supreme Judge of the United States
+while I help him. Just as soon as the money comes we shall all go to
+college, Lovey, Douglass, Uncle Pomp and I, to get ready for our life
+work."
+
+"What course will Uncle Pompey take?" I couldn't help asking, because
+Uncle Pompey is so old he couldn't learn to turn one of his own batter
+cakes the wrong way around.
+
+"Domestic Science," Roxanne laughed back at her own self; and just
+then Tony came in with his pie catastrophe that caused so much
+trouble.
+
+"You two hubbies, you had better lay aside the darning-needle and
+seize the pie plate," he said, fanning himself with Roxanne's
+scissors. "We've just decided in Scout Council to take the Palefaces
+out to the Harpeth ridge to hunt spring shoots and roots, and we
+always count on you for pies, Roxy, Stocking-darner."
+
+"How lovely, Tony!" exclaimed Roxanne, rising right above the pies
+which sank my heart like lead to think of her having to furnish; and
+where would she get them? I was so dismayed that I never thought of
+being embarrassed about being left out, as I, of course expected to
+be; and so it came as a proud surprise when Tony asked me, in the
+nicest way a boy could think of, to go with them. That is, he didn't
+ask me, but ordered me what to bring like I had been going on the
+Raccoon outings since infancy.
+
+"You are to bring a white mountain cake in a cocoanut snowstorm, City
+Bubbles," he said, with that funny flare of his eyes that always sets
+me laughing inside whether I want to or not. "Belle is brewing
+sandwiches and Mamie Sue is croquetting with some chicken. Don't tell
+the dumpling, but we are going to rub asafetida on her shoes and leave
+her to rest on a stone so as to lose her good and then find her by
+smelling her track like true Scouts. Now, don't spoil a single pie,
+Roxy; we'll need all six."
+
+"I won't, I won't," answered Roxanne; and I saw that grandmother pose
+begin to come to her head and I knew that it meant that she would
+shake six pies out of that empty larder like the widow in the Bible
+did the meal. "Did you ask Miss Prissy, Tony?" she asked, as if to
+change the subject for an instant's relief.
+
+"I did," answered Tony with a laugh; "and Miss Bubbles said she would
+go accompanied by a basket of stuffed eggs to return accompanied by a
+bunch of stuffed Scouts. We also asked the Colonel, and he made us a
+speech of acceptance twenty minutes long, Pink and me. But I must
+hurry along and encourage Mamie Sue not to eat all the chicken tasties
+as she makes them. Do you two Palefaces promise to rustle around as
+soon as I go?"
+
+"We do," we both answered as he went out of the gate. Then we sat
+still, paralyzed, instead of the promised rustling. Only I was the
+most upset. Roxanne always brings out the rainbow and shakes it when
+the clouds get down very low.
+
+"What are you going to do about the pies?" I asked, forgetting my
+promise to myself never to force Roxanne to look any kind of problem
+in the face as long as she could keep her back to it.
+
+"Well," she answered so placidly that I felt ashamed of myself, "I
+have just been thinking those apples up. I can starve Lovey and myself
+enough to get the things for the crust, but where are the apples to
+come from? Won't it be fun to look back from richness and remember
+when an apple looked as big as one of the Harpeth Hills?"
+
+"But, haven't you got any apple plan at all?" I again forgot my
+resolve and asked. I'm often ashamed of myself for being so practical
+about things, but I can't help it, and I couldn't see those pies
+coming down on a rainbow. She had to have the apples to save her
+family pride, and apples don't grow on dream trees.
+
+"Not a plan," she answered, snipping a thread with a steady hand. "But
+they'll come from some place. Now, I've got to think up stories to
+make Lovey forget that he wants anything but some corn-bread and
+buttermilk for supper. That'll save the batter-cake flour for the
+pie-crust and some of the lard and butter too. If I can amuse him past
+breakfast with just corn meal mush, I'll have enough flour for them
+all. Uncle Pompey has lots of spice and things, so it'll only be the
+apples. Maybe I can--"
+
+"Wait a minute, I've got a plan!" I exclaimed quickly; for being
+Roxanne's friend often makes me need to think very quickly indeed.
+"You go on believing they'll come, and your believing and my plan will
+be almost sure to get them. I'll have to go home right now."
+
+"Your plan won't make me have to--to let anybody give them to me, will
+it, Phyllis?" And Roxanne's eyes were so soft with entreaty to spare
+that family pride that I had to swallow the inconvenient lump in my
+throat again. I wish my eyes knew how to mist with tears like a girl's
+ought to do instead of my choking up like a boy. But I had my voice
+good and steady by the time I got opposite Father across his office
+table.
+
+"And so," he said, as he looked at me with an expression I feel on
+myself when I am going to take hold of some of the knots in Roxanne's
+affairs, "I am to buy two barrels of apples here in the spring when
+they are gold nuggets, and help you pack up ten baskets of them for me
+to send to the furnace office force as a seasonable compliment, just
+so that stiff-necked young Byrd can carry his family pride along home
+in the basket with the apples for the making of six pies. Right
+expensive pies, those!"
+
+"Yes, Father, I know they are," I answered firmly but pathetically.
+"But I told you Lovelace Peyton and Roxanne are starving to save the
+crust; and my friends' troubles are mine. When he gets the chance to
+prove that steel explosion thing and people buy the process from him,
+they won't need friends, or rather they will need friends more than
+they ever did, with all that money, but they won't need apples. I'm
+sorry it is being such an expensive thing for me to have a friend, but
+I must stand by her now if you will let me."
+
+"Steel!" said Father, and his eyes went into narrow slits in a way I
+don't like, because he forgets I'm living. And he was in one of those
+spells of turning himself inside himself to think, when I glanced at
+Rogers, his foreman at the furnaces, who was going over some papers at
+another desk. And as I glanced at him Father came out of his inside
+and looked at him too. I never did like Mr. Rogers.
+
+"Rogers," said Father briskly, "go telephone the Hill Grocery Company
+to pack up ten large baskets of apples and send them over to the
+office. You go over and give them to the boys and cover up Miss
+Phyllis's track effectually by a speech of presentation. And remember,
+Rogers, that whatever Miss Phyllis says in my office is strictly
+business and is to be observed as absolutely confidential."
+
+As Rogers went out of the door I felt my heart sink in a queer way,
+and I turned to find Father looking at me sternly.
+
+"Phil," he said, in the tone of voice I feel sure fathers use to their
+errant sons, "if you have another person's secret to guard, do it
+carefully and do not let the excitement of the moment make you let it
+slip."
+
+"Oh, Father," I fairly gasped, "did I tell you anything about Mr.
+Douglass's secret that I ought not?"
+
+"You told about all you know, daughter; but fortunately you didn't
+know enough to do much damage. I happen to know I can trust Rogers as
+myself. Now, go to your pie fixings, for I'm unusually busy."
+
+I turned to the door with a queer sinking feeling coming up in me when
+he called me back again.
+
+"Of course, Phil, you know what a pleasure it is to me for you to
+shower apples on the Byrds and others, and I want to speak to you
+about a little matter that is troubling me and ask your help. We have
+got to spend some money in Byrdsville, and you must help me to do it.
+I can't get Henri to buy his supplies for the kitchen here, under any
+circumstances--he shrugs his French shoulders, gives me two uneatable
+meals, and orders from New York as usual. I can't very well wear
+Byrdsville clothes myself, and there seems no way to drop cash in the
+town unless you can find some way. Buy things at all the stores and
+charge them to me. Give away and use what you can, but _buy_. We
+owe it to the town and we must do it. Can you promise to take part of
+the job for me?"
+
+"I'll try, Father," I answered doubtfully. "I like the kind of clothes
+the girls wear, so I will get mine in the stores, and I can give
+presents to all who will allow it."
+
+"That's it--presents--presents to your friends," said Father in a
+relieved tone of voice, and I could see that he had no idea of the
+burden he had put on my shoulders. "Now fade away, and let me work,
+kiddie. You are all to the good!"
+
+As I walked along home my heart was so heavy down in my toes that my
+feet almost stuck to the pavement--not only about the task of spending
+the money, but about the secret. However, I reasoned it up into my
+breast again. If my father is one of the men that magazines write
+against and say is too rich to be good, he has always told me the
+truth; and when he said I hadn't done the great secret any damage I
+believed him. If he can trust Rogers as himself, I can, too.
+
+But after this, when I know anything that all the world can't know I'm
+going to wear a horsehair ring, like Belle makes Mamie Sue do, to
+remind me not to forget and tell. I thought I was stronger-minded than
+that, but I see I'm not. You see, leather Louise, I must be more
+trustworthy than just any girl; for if I'm untrustworthy, then it will
+be a tragedy, because it will prove that I inherited it and so be an
+evidence against Father in my own mind and the world's too.
+
+Since I have been with Roxanne so much, and seen so many things which
+prove that God is looking directly after her, as my getting the apple
+plan shows, I feel so much nearer to Him. I am going to pray to Him to
+help me to help Father, and take both our honors in His keeping. Amen!
+Goodnight!
+
+Of course, the whole spring keeps springing wonderful days on a
+person, each one lovelier than the last; but the one that came down
+from over Old Harpeth, as the tallest hump on the ridge is called, was
+so lovely that it was hard to believe that I was not just seeing it
+with Roxanne's eyes. If it was so beautiful, with its orchard smells
+and blooms and buzzing of bees and soft little winds, to me, I wonder
+what it did look like to _her_. And to think that Roxanne was
+almost in tears before it was nine o'clock.
+
+The interurban that runs by Byrdsville and out over the ridge to the
+city has cars only every two hours, so if we didn't catch the
+eight-ten one, we couldn't go until the ten-ten, and that would make
+it very late for the Scouts to go through all the kinds of drills they
+had planned for. Some of us had to sprain ankles and make believe to
+step on snakes, and then Mamie Sue had to be lost and traced, only she
+didn't know it yet; so Tony said that we would have to start very
+early. It was about half past seven when he came for me while all the
+rest of them waited at the corner for us. We then trooped down to get
+Roxanne and Lovelace Peyton; but disaster met us at the door. It was
+Lovelace Peyton dancing and yelling like a wild Indian while Roxanne
+tried to quiet him and unbutton his white linen dress-up at the same
+time.
+
+"Please everybody go on. We can't come," Roxanne called to us at the
+gate. "Lovey sat down on one of the hot pies that Uncle Pomp had just
+taken out of the stove for me to put in the basket, and it burned him
+through his trousers and blouse and all. Uncle Pomp has got a dreadful
+fit of asthma, and the pie is all over everything where Lovey ran
+around and around. I've got to scrub him and the whole house. Please
+go on and don't be late for the train." And as Roxanne looked out at
+us over the dancing Lovelace Peyton that was the first time I had ever
+seen her face without its dimple on the left side of her chin, or her
+head down out of the rosy cloud.
+
+"It always happens just this way, Roxy," said Belle in a reproving
+tone of voice. "You promised to begin to get ready last night, so as
+not to delay anything or anybody. We're just not going to wait!"
+
+"I did try, Belle," answered Roxanne, with a little sob coming into
+her voice that made both Tony and me so mad at one time that it is a
+wonder that we didn't both explode together.
+
+"Here, you bubbles," said Tony, jumping the gate as I went through it,
+"get busy with this situation. We've got almost a half-hour, so be
+doing something, everybody. Belle, you help Roxy skin that kid and get
+him into clean clothes while I swab up and light old Pomp's
+jimson-weed pipe for him?" And as Tony spoke he started to the rear of
+the house.
+
+"No, no. I'm hurted bad, and I won't let anybody but Phyllis touch me.
+I'll out off Belle's arm if she comes nigh me," said Lovelace Peyton
+in the rudest voice; but it did me good to get hold of him and begin
+to peel him while Roxanne stood petrified at the idea of hurrying all
+her calamities onto the car in twenty minutes.
+
+"Oh, I'm not dressed and the pies are not packed and--" began Roxanne,
+but the dimple also began to play at the same time.
+
+"I'll help you dress, Roxanne," said Belle meekly; for Belle is more
+afraid of Tony's explosions than of anything else on earth, and he had
+looked at her with a stern expression as she had fussed at and
+threatened to leave Roxanne.
+
+"I'll pack the pies," said Mamie Sue, with plain delight at the
+prospect.
+
+"Well, hurry, Dumpling, and don't take a bite out of a stray corner of
+more than half those pies," Tony answered her as he rolled up his
+shirt sleeves and started toward the kitchen. All the other members of
+the Raccoon Patrol were with the other girls at the station, and
+nobody could go without Tony, who had bought the combination ticket
+for everybody, at a bargain.
+
+It is all very well to say that "haste makes waste," but there is a
+kind of hurry that gets things done, and Tony knows how to put that
+kind into action. He and Mamie Sue kept to the kitchen as their scene
+of operations, and before we knew it old Uncle Pomp was seated humped
+over his pipe and beginning to breathe easy. Mamie Sue had hopped
+around to keep out of the swirls of Tony's mop while she packed those
+ill-fated but precious pies in the basket, and she was breathing
+almost as hard as Uncle Pompey.
+
+I did the best I could with Lovelace Peyton, though only the blue
+apron with the largest pink patches was whole and clean; so he had to
+go that way, which I know hurt Roxanne, for he had been so lovely to
+look at in his part of the grandmother's sheet.
+
+Belle was buttoning Roxanne's festive white linen up the back as Tony
+came down the hall shooing panting Mamie Sue with the basket in front
+of him, and collected us all. I grabbed Roxanne's hat from the closet
+for her and swung Lovelace Peyton up on Tony's shoulder so he could
+run on ahead with him. Belle followed Roxanne, buttoning her up all
+the way to the front gate, while Mamie Sue trundled along steadily
+with the two baskets.
+
+I've heard about the excitements of the city and the quiet of the
+country, but I have the opinion that the terms in this case are mixed.
+We all fell aboard the car half dead, but we caught it!
+
+I'm not going to describe this Scout outing in detail to you, my
+leather-bound Louise, because it would take all night. I'm so tired
+that I doubt if I get up in the morning until it is afternoon, but
+there are a few high lights I will mention because I never want to
+forget them. A girl wants to keep the details of the first happiest
+day of her life always, even if she has many others.
+
+Mamie Sue got lost satisfactorily, but they forgot she had Belle's
+basket with her, and when they found her some of the sandwiches were
+lost forever; but Mamie Sue was happy. It was wonderful the way Pink
+tracked her shoes by the asafetida. That is one of the reasons Scouts
+can't smoke: they must keep their sense of smell to track things with.
+One of the Willis girls let Sam Hayes treat her for snake-bite by the
+rules of the book and never said a word; but then neither one of those
+Willis girls ever says anything except what they have to in classroom,
+and we like them immensely. They are Tony's first cousins and both are
+of the first families of Byrdsville.
+
+But the sensation of the day was when Tony really fell and skinned his
+arm bad--and what do you think he did? He let Lovelace Peyton do all
+the things to it that he showed him how to do out of the book. I never
+saw any human being in my life so happy as that little patched boy
+was, and it was marvelous how he understood just what Tony said and
+did it quicker than any of us could. His slender little fingers worked
+like a grown-up's.
+
+"Oh, if his father, the doctor, could have just seen him," said Miss
+Prissy in such a sweetly sympathetic voice that the Colonel blew his
+nose. He was Roxanne's father's best friend, and had watched him cut
+up what was left of people on the battle-field in the Civil War. He
+told us all about it. I feel that we must take better care of Lovelace
+Peyton, but I am sorry for Roxanne to have two geniuses in her family
+to watch over. It is such a responsibility and requires even more of
+my help.
+
+The luncheon was a success. Everybody ate everything, especially the
+great surgeon and Mamie Sue. The dried sticks made the sparks on the
+leaves for Pink so much to his pride that Tony had to call him Rosebud
+to keep him cool, he said, and Sam's kettle hung on the forked sticks
+the first time and boiled the best potatoes I ever tasted.
+
+The boys signaled to the Colonel by the Scout language and he got the
+signals perfectly. Then he told them war tales until time to start
+home. He carried Lovelace Peyton, who had gone to sleep on the car,
+home in his arms, while Miss Prissy walked behind him with Roxanne. I
+wonder why Miss Prissy doesn't want to marry such a grand man as the
+Colonel is?
+
+But a strange thing happened to Tony and me as we came by the side
+wall of our garden after we had taken the quiet Willises home and he
+was bringing me to my front gate. It makes me nervous to think about
+it. That secret about the steel, which is going to keep Roxanne from
+living in such poverty, weighs on my mind so that I never forget it.
+It is right out there in the little shed and it is both dangerous and
+precious.
+
+Suddenly Tony stopped me right opposite the shed and gave the Scout
+signal of warning.
+
+"Tip-hist-toe," he said under his breath. "Did you see a shadow dodge
+behind Roxy's cottage just a minute ago, Phyllis?" he asked, in a
+whisper that was enough to make almost any girl's blood run cold in
+her body.
+
+"I did," I answered him in just as blood-curdling a whisper, "but
+Uncle Pompey goes out to see after his hens just about this time every
+night. I think that was the shadow."
+
+"Of course," Tony laughed in a human voice again. "Say Phyllis, you
+are one brick, a yard wide, all wool, and a foot thick. There are not
+the usual bubble squeals in you." I never was so confused in all my
+life. I don't know how to answer people when they express a liking for
+me, because I have never had many compliments passed on me.
+
+"Thank you, Tony," I said, just as humbly as I felt, which was very
+humble indeed.
+
+"Now, Phyllis, I wasn't patting any Fido on the head," Tony laughed in
+a funny way; for what I said had teased him, though I don't know just
+why. "And also I didn't say that to you because you didn't yelp when I
+scared up a bogie for you, but because I saw how you came near beating
+me to Roxy's catastrophes this morning when Belle wanted to give her
+the jolly go-by. Old Roxanny has some rough going at times, and it is
+good to know that she has got a bubble next door to stand by her in a
+stocking-darning way a fellow can't. Good-night!"
+
+Tony Luttrell is an honorable gentleman, if he is just in short
+trousers yet, and I appreciate his friendship.
+
+That shadow _will_ make me uneasy. I feel like that cross, nervous
+white hen of Uncle Pompey's, only as if I were sitting on dynamite
+bottles instead of eggs. I will and do trust my father, but can I
+trust him to trust Rogers? Oh, I wish he was just a lawyer with almost
+no practice, like Tony's father, and was sitting in the office all day
+long doing nothing, where I knew he was, instead of going back and
+forth from the city with other men that have more money than it is
+right to have! I'd even be willing to have him keep the grocery store
+even if it did mean that he wasn't quite as first-family as Judge
+Luttrell and the Byrds.
+
+Oh, I do love my father--I do--I do!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It does seem a pity that a person can't put an Idol on a pedestal and
+keep it here without having it come down and bother around the house.
+The idea of being introduced to Mr. Douglass Byrd and having to speak
+directly to him with my own voice has kept me miserable all this month
+in which I have been so perfectly happy being Roxanne's friend and
+confidante, but it has happened and I'm glad it's over, though it was
+under trying circumstances.
+
+These are they. My fears have come to pass and in this eventful month
+Lovelace Peyton has grown from a slender, frail little boy into almost
+as much of a roly-poly as Mamie Sue, and looks more like her than he
+does like Roxanne. I try not to feed him more than four times a day
+extra, but he is stern with me about it. Sometimes he will trade the
+cake I give him about four o'clock for a new shaped bottle, but lots
+of times he gets the bottle and the cake both away from me. I just
+can't be strong-minded with Lovelace Peyton, like I ought to be to
+make up for the way Roxanne forgets to see him from the rosy cloud.
+
+"If you'll give me a bottle, I'll give you one mouth-kiss, Phyllis;
+but for cake and bottles too, I can maybe make it two," is the way he
+bargains with me. Fifteen years is a long time to starve for a little
+brother to love, so Lovelace Peyton almost always gets both the cake
+and bottles.
+
+But his fat has begun to burst out of all the clothes he has and
+somebody has got to get him new ones. Roxanne and I were managing it
+when Mr. Douglass interrupted us this morning; and I'm glad a man is
+so much stupider than a woman or maybe his feelings would have got
+hurt and I'd have had to argue him into my plan like I did Roxanne. I
+feel sure I would have failed with him. He is the first Idol I ever
+had and I am new at managing either friends or idols. However, I have
+got so I can get the best of Roxanne when it is urgently necessary.
+
+"It's the funniest thing to me, Phyllis," Roxanne said the other
+afternoon, as I went over to see her about my rhetoric lesson, "but
+rich as you are, I don't at all mind your seeing my scrimps like I do
+the other girls, even Mamie Sue. You are like finding a grandmother's
+thimble that fits you exactly and is pure gold."
+
+Oh, I wish I could learn to be gracious and say lovely things like
+Roxanne, but I'm just a corked bottle and I can't get the stopper out.
+
+"What are you doing?" I asked her instead of giving her a squeeze and
+saying, "You are the dearest thing on earth to me, Roxanne," which was
+what I really felt.
+
+"I'm sitting here before this old dress I found in the trunk in the
+attic and trying to think how I could make Lovey wear the flowered
+aprons I can make out of it. I almost know he won't, for he has begun
+to say what 'looks boy' and what 'looks girl.' I did hope I could keep
+him ignorant of the difference this summer at least. Would you ask him
+before you make the aprons or trust to his not noticing?"
+
+The old dress was the full skirt of fifty years ago, with huge red
+roses on a white-and-green dotted background, and, as aprons, would
+have made the snake doctor look like a very young circus. I couldn't
+stand the thought and cranked my mind as hard as I could for a half
+minute. The idea came, and it is a good thing to be perfectly straight
+in the treatment of your friends at all times, so that when a crisis
+comes they will depend on you.
+
+"Roxanne," I said, looking determinedly and sternly into her face with
+Father's own expression, "have I ever offered you a single thing to
+eat except when you were company like the other girls, or anything
+else that would hurt the Byrd pride?"
+
+"No, you haven't, Phyllis, and that's why I don't mind telling or
+letting you see things. You understand that it is for the cause, and I
+don't have to be afraid that you will hurt--hurt my feelings."
+
+I never thought it would be possible for a girl to look at me like
+Roxanne Byrd looked at me across the pile of ragged little aprons and
+old dresses. I thank God for it!
+
+"Well," I said, "for that dress I want to trade you this blue gingham
+I have got on to make the aprons out of. It will make three if the
+tucks are ripped out of the skirt. I want the old flowered skirt to
+make some cushions for the window seat in the room I sleep in, for it
+will be just the thing to go with the old mahogany of your
+grandmother's. It is real old-fashioned chintz and is worth just about
+ten times as much as this dress I have got on, which you know I bought
+at Mr. Hadley's, with the other dozen ones that Miss Green is making
+for me, at twenty-five cents a yard. Will you?"
+
+Roxanne doesn't know about that awful spending burden I have had laid
+on me and she is just as interested in helping me go and buy myself
+Byrdsville clothes as a friend can be in another's pleasure--not
+knowing it to be painful responsibility.
+
+I locked the box that came from New York with all my spring and summer
+things in it, in a closet the day it came, and while these things are,
+of course crude, I like to be in clothes like the other girls. I seem
+to fit in better. I spent seventy-five dollars at that store by hard
+effort, and I think won Mr. Hadley's good will for life for both
+Father and me. Also Miss Green's check was gratifyingly large both to
+her and me.
+
+"Will you trade, Roxanne?" I asked again, keeping the eagerness out of
+my voice with my father's stern will.
+
+"Oh, I don't think I ought." Roxanne hesitated and then said: "Are you
+sure you don't--that is, are you sure?"
+
+"I am," I answered briskly, and in a business like tone. "You can't
+say that lovely old stuff won't make the very cushions for that very
+room, Roxanne."
+
+"They truly will be lovely, Phyllis, and that gingham will solve the
+problem for Lovey's whole summer. To-morrow we will--"
+
+"Not to-morrow; right now, and I'll help you rip and cut out from the
+skirt," I said, and began to undo my belt. I knew better than to let
+that family pride get to simmering in Roxanne in the wee small hours
+of the night. "A trade is a trade, as soon as it is made. Give me my
+dress."
+
+"Oh, Phyllis, there never was anybody like you," laughed Roxanne in a
+voice that is like music to a person who understands what friendship
+really is and hasn't had very much.
+
+We both laughed as I slipped the quaint old dress over my head and
+buttoned the low-necked waist, with its short puffy-sleeves, straight
+down the front. It had such a style of its own and fitted me so that I
+began to prance in front of the long mirror in the living room, which
+is gilt, a hundred years old, and belonged to the stiff grandmother
+over the mantel who had probably pranced in the same gown in the same
+way fifty years ago, if her heart was as young and happy as mine.
+
+And those were the trying circumstances under which I met the Idol. He
+stood there in the doorway and laughed until his big shoulders shook,
+and his wonderful eyes danced like sparks. I blushed so painfully that
+it felt like measles; but when he saw my embarrassment break out on me
+like that, a wonderful sad kindness came into his eyes and he stopped
+laughing.
+
+"It's Miss Phyllis Forsythe, isn't it, that I have come home to find
+masquerading as my own grandmother?" he said, in a warm voice so like
+Roxanne's that the scarlatina on my face began to subside and my knees
+stopped trembling. "You don't know how indebted to you I am for coming
+over to make Roxy take a playtime."
+
+Playtime, with all that pattern and darned aprons and my gingham dress
+in a pile on the ancestral sofa in the corner with the scissors and
+needle and thread gaping at Roxanne and me from the table! Women ought
+to be very thankful at times for men's stupidity.
+
+It was all very well for the red on my face to pale and my breath to
+come easier again; but no fifteen-year-old girl has an answer ready
+for a remark of a man who is as great and wonderful and famous as Mr.
+Douglass Byrd is going to be soon. I was just getting so loose-jointed
+from mortification that my mind had fainted away at the very time I
+needed it, when Tony and Pink Chadwell came and broke into the
+situation with the Raccoon whistle for the palefaces. They also broke
+through the side window with their "Tip-hist-toe" signal that always
+gives the girls cold creeps even in daytime. Mamie Sue calls it
+goose-flesh and Tony reproves Belle for telling her that was what she
+had all the time. I don't know what we would do with Belle if it
+wasn't for Tony's powerful disposition. And one thing I am sure of,
+never were there in this world such grand boys as Anthony Wayne
+Luttrell and Matthew Foster Chadwell--that's Pink's whole name--for
+they didn't any more notice that old flowered dress than if it had
+been the blue gingham, or either Roxanne or me, but they gave the
+scout-master salute to Mr. Douglass and began their business right
+away.
+
+[Illustration: He stood there in the doorway and laughed until his big
+shoulders shook]
+
+"Raccoon Chief," said Tony, "the patrol awaits you in the Crotch, at
+your call."
+
+"On my way," answered Mr. Douglass with just as much seriousness as
+Tony had in his voice. Tony had told me how Mr. Douglass had organized
+the Raccoon Patrol and taught it all it knows and was just the guiding
+star of all their young lives, only Tony didn't put it that way; he
+called him their "jolly old peace-maker." That means that all the
+Raccoons look up to him and adore him and try to be exactly like him.
+In the Bible if David had been eight years older than Jonathan, there
+would have been the same situation in Jerusalem as in Byrdsville,
+Tennessee.
+
+"I wonder what is the matter with the Scouts," said Roxanne, as we
+both began to rip on the dress so I could help her cut the aprons.
+"Douglass didn't say what he came home for in the middle of the
+afternoon and Tony was so serious that I hardly knew him. Pink was
+speechless from excitement. They all acted that way when they found
+out about the queer man who hung around selling patent medicine,
+trying to find out where Miss Prissy kept the Talbot emerald necklace
+that came from England before the Revolution."
+
+Because Miss Prissy lives alone it is the duty of all of the Raccoons
+to patrol her ever so many times in the day, and Judge Luttrell lets
+Tony go out the last thing before he goes to bed and give Miss Prissy
+that signal we hear every night about half past nine. Miss Prissy says
+it makes her comfortable the whole night, and the Colonel gave the
+Raccoons their wireless outfit for being such "Knights of the Round
+Miss Prissy" instead of the "Table," Pink said; though the Colonel
+never mentioned Miss Prissy in the speech of presentation at all, but
+called it Table.
+
+I'm not romantic myself, but I could never treat a man with the lack
+of heart with which Miss Prissy treats Colonel Stockell. She makes
+herself as beautiful as possible and sits on the front porch with him,
+and I would call that an honorable cause for marriage, but Roxanne
+says that in Byrdsville no tie binds a lady to marry a gentleman until
+after it is done. Such treatment does not look to me like what father
+calls a "square deal"; but Miss Priscilla may have some way of
+squaring it to her conscience, as she is very religious and
+charitable.
+
+"I'm glad Douglass doesn't have to know that we traded dresses,
+Phyllis," said Roxanne, as we both snipped away on the long seams,
+after he had gone with Tony and Pink. Why it is so much more fun to
+rip things than to sew them, is a question I put to you, leather
+Louise.
+
+"Just last night," Roxanne continued, "he made me sit out here on the
+porch with him and he told me it might be all summer that he will have
+to use his wages to get the things for the experiments. Mr. Rogers has
+acted queerly and he is afraid to try anything out at these furnaces,
+so we have to save up enough for him to go up to Kentucky to some
+little furnaces there and make the experiment. It will cost a lot for
+the trip and the things, but I think we can do it. This simple life
+agrees with us all. Just look how fat Lovey is getting with hardly
+anything but buttermilk and corn-bread. It makes me happy to look at
+him."
+
+The giggle that I had to smother down in my heart was one of the good
+things that come in a person's life and leave a mark on their natures
+for always. I think it is a fine plan to save little happinesses and
+put them up on a spirit shelf to take down to feed your remembers on
+in days when pleasures are scarce. I can't believe that this life of
+being with and of other people is going to last for me; so if I have
+to go back into loneliness I will have had it to remember.
+
+Any mention of that dynamite secret and Rogers in the same
+conversation always makes me uneasy and that is why I had loneliness
+thoughts.
+
+"What has Mr. Rogers done to make your brother uneasy about the
+secret?" I asked Roxanne in a voice that I could see, myself, was
+worried.
+
+"Nothing at all," laughed Roxanne; "but we are all just as
+superstitious as old Uncle Pompey, and because Douglass has a
+'feeling' about Mr. Rogers, we all have to have it, too. We make it a
+point to 'feel' with each other as both Douglass and I did when we
+just knew with Uncle Pompey that the white rooster would die from the
+lye soap that Lovey made him take in a pill. It took Douglass and me
+two whole days to get Lovey to go on his honor about doctoring the
+chicken, but he finally agreed, if we would promise to let him do
+things to all of us whenever he wanted to. Douglass lets him treat his
+head with cold water, which is just hard rubbing that he likes better
+than anything, every night before supper. I'm wearing a yarn string
+around my ankle now for rheumatism that I haven't got. In fact we are
+all 'on honor' with Lovey, to save the 'live stock,' as Uncle Pompey
+calls himself and the chickens."
+
+Never having had any experience with little boys, I can't say
+positively that Lovelace Peyton is a wonder, but I firmly believe it
+and his honor is entirely grown up while he is not quite five. I've
+seen it work. If he says he will or he won't, he acts accordingly, no
+matter what happens to him or anybody else. But he is careful how he
+promises and he leaves himself plenty of room to carry on what he
+calls his practice, to the uneasiness of himself and all the
+neighbors. It cost Miss Prissy ten bottles, a pint of red paint, and a
+package of sulphur to buy the life of her gray cat for this year, but
+now she has no uneasiness about Tab at all.
+
+I suppose if Roxanne and I sat down and talked one month straight
+through without eating and sleeping we might make up all the time we
+have lost out of each other's company, at least just skim the cream
+off each other's lives, but we'll never get to it. Too many people
+want Roxanne besides me, and I'm grateful to be allowed to be in the
+things she is in. I try to keep the other girls from feeling that I am
+in the way, and I don't believe they would feel that way at all if
+Belle didn't still keep prodding them up with her distrust of my
+money. I wish Belle just had a little wealth and would find out that
+it isn't anything at all and can be forgotten without the least
+trouble.
+
+Mamie Sue wants to like me and the two silent Willises do, also, but
+Belle dusts my gold into their eyes so they can just blink at me so
+far. But the blinks get friendlier every day and I hope some shock
+will make them open their eyes to me like kittens do on the ninth
+day--and their hearts, too.
+
+The tallest Willis gave me the first peony that bloomed on their bush
+to take to my mother, and I caught a sight of her awkward heart that
+did me good. I defied the nurse and told the white, white little thing
+on the pillow, that is all the mother I ever had, that one of my
+friends sent it to her, and I got a flash of a smile, such as I had
+never had before. The nurse said just that little bit of excitement
+made her worse, and I've promised never to do anything but take my
+daily look at her again--but--she _is_ my mother, even if--
+
+Well, anyway, Louise of leather, just as Roxanne and I had got the
+skirt ripped up and the pattern straightened out, we saw all the girls
+coming, and from the way they were talking we saw something
+interesting was surely happening, had happened, or was going to
+happen.
+
+"Hide the gingham, Roxanne, while I slip over the wall and change my
+dress," I said quickly. "Our business arrangements are nobody else's
+business."
+
+"Will you come right back?" asked Roxanne in a way that made me know
+she would worry if I didn't.
+
+I would rather have stayed at home until the girls had had their visit
+and gone home, but I have thought out just how I ought to act about
+Roxanne and her friends and me. It is only fair to pay no attention to
+how they feel, but to do what makes Roxanne happy in case of the
+mix-up of us all. My pride and Roxanne's are different. Hers has been
+handed down for generations and she can act on it without argument
+with herself, but mine is my own kind and only I understand it. It is
+new and I have to plan it out by thinking. The girls all think that
+because I have finer clothes and travel and am rich, that I think I am
+better than they are and am proud of it. Richness is not my fault, any
+more than a hunched back would be, and it is my duty to forget it
+whether they do or not. I act accordingly.
+
+Another thing: I believe something is making my father see the error
+of his ways and I hope that some day I will see him settled into being
+a good and great man just like Judge Luttrell and the Colonel are and
+Roxanne's father was. He has acted in a peculiar way just lately. Last
+night he drew me up close to him and stood by the window a long time
+without speaking.
+
+"Phil," he finally said, not in the voice he generally uses as if he
+were speaking to his only son--but with a daughter tone in it--"you
+have made good in Byrdsville, and I want to tell you that I'm proud of
+you. I doubted whether you could do it. A bunch of such youngsters as
+you have made friends with would be a test for any man, much less a
+young woman. I'm their friend because they are yours, and pretty soon
+I am going to prove it--like the sentimental fools that all fathers of
+almost-grown daughters get to be. Go to bed, kiddie, and say an extra
+one for Father."
+
+Now all this is directly connected with the state I found the girls in
+over at the Byrd cottage, when I finally dressed and got back again,
+after stopping to bargain with Lovelace Peyton to go without the
+four-o'clock cookies for half a tube of perfectly harmless tooth-paste
+that he wanted for some kind of plaster to put on Uncle Pompey's heel,
+which is always painful enough to occupy most of the snake-doctor's
+time.
+
+"No, I don't see why we should always tell Phyllis every interesting
+thing that happens to us or is going to happen," Belle was saying in
+such a decided tone of voice that it carried through the front door,
+across the porch, and halfway down the front walk.
+
+Disagreeability has a kind of force that knocks one down before
+pleasantness hardly gets to him. I knew Roxanne said something in
+answer to that; in my heart I knew, but I couldn't hear what it was
+with my ears.
+
+"Well," came Mamie Sue's voice, muffled through a piece of fudge she
+always carries in her pocket, in case she goes a square away from home
+and is overtaken by her appetite. She always has enough for everybody
+else, too, I must not forget to add. "Well, if it is Miss Prissy's
+robber come back, that makes the boys act so, Phyllis might just as
+well be scared as the rest of us; and if it is something pleasant,
+why, let her have a share of that, too." Some day I'm going-to break
+loose from myself and hug Mamie Sue's funny fatness until she squeals.
+
+"I don't believe that if it was just a frolic the boys would have got
+Douglass to come away from his work to the Crotch; but maybe he was
+going up-town anyway, and they knew that," said Roxanne as I came in
+the door and was given welcomes of different degrees. The tall Willis
+is getting so that she moves over for me to sit down by her, even if
+she is just sitting on one small chair. I wish she could know how that
+pleases me.
+
+"Did the boys look to you as if the thing that is making them all act
+so important was nice or disagreeable, Phyllis?" asked Roxanne as she
+got out the inevitable darning bag.
+
+The short Willis moved nearer and began to help sort and get ready for
+patching. I always keep a thimble in Roxanne's darning bag now, but
+sometimes the short girl beats me to it. The others never notice that
+Roxanne's hands are never empty of patching jobs. Still Mamie Sue does
+attentively feed her fudge in hunks while she darns.
+
+"I don't know boys well enough to diagram their expressions," I
+answered. "They always look excited and queer to me, and I can't tell
+their jokes from their other affairs. What have they been doing?"
+
+"Being as hateful and secret as they know how to be," answered Belle
+crossly. "Boys are nothing but rough, rude miseries; and the next time
+Tony Luttrell tells me to 'bubble along' as he did Mamie Sue and me,
+when Mamie Sue only wanted to stop him to give him a piece of fudge, I
+am going to tell him what I think of him."
+
+"Hope I'll be there," said the tall Willis behind my shoulder, and I
+never enjoyed a silent remark more. Belle is as afraid of Tony's laugh
+as she is of a cow in the lane.
+
+"Now I know that something awful has happened or is coming if Tony
+spoke that way," said Roxanne, with such anxiety coming into her face
+that the timid Willis dropped her stocking and Mamie Sue gulped down
+such a large piece of candy that she almost had to choke. "Oh, girls,
+do you suppose that dreadful man has got out of jail in the city and
+is coming back to maybe--maybe--?"
+
+But the words were stopped in Roxanne's mouth with a great, pleasant
+laugh as the Idol stood in the door. You would know that "Idol" is the
+name for him by the way all the girls look awed and afraid of him, but
+interested too. Tony and Pink and Sam were in the background like the
+angels in the picture of Sir Galahad.
+
+"This is an official committee to invite you to be the guests of Mr.
+William Forsythe on a hay-mooning on Friday next, to start from his
+home at the hour of seven-thirty, in honor of the birthday of his
+daughter, Miss Phyllis, who is quite as surprised as the rest of you.
+The rest of this speech will be continued on that evening." And he was
+gone before anybody got any breath again.
+
+That's what my father meant by showing my friends that he appreciated
+them.
+
+But Belle Kirby's expression would make anybody with a sense of humor
+laugh. Can live coals be showered on a person if nobody ever intended
+it?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The desire to be popular may be one of the unworthy ambitions of a
+person's heart, yet there is nothing in the world so delightful as
+having it happen to you. And if having almost everybody like you, and
+show it by being nice and friendly to you on all occasions, makes you
+happy your own self, how much more happy you are when somebody you
+love gets a slice of it all along with you!
+
+My father is getting to be one of the beloved men of this town, like
+Judge Luttrell and the Colonel. It has been going on gradually for
+some time, but I was afraid to notice it for fear I was mistaken. Such
+is the result of the sincere prayers of a daughter, and I certainly
+was sincere in wanting this reform. And better than even his sitting
+and smoking and joking in the Judge's office and walking down the
+street in a friendly manner with Mr. Chadwell is the notice that Mr.
+Douglass Byrd has been taking of him lately. The Idol has been to see
+him twice, in the evening, and both times I have heard my father's
+jolly laugh boom out in a way the nurse says will have to stop, for it
+made Mother ask to see him and be ill because she couldn't. And just
+day before yesterday Father came up the street with the great
+inventor, and they both came in and sat with Roxanne and me on the
+cottage porch to smoke their cigars. Roxanne was just sweet and good
+and easy with Father like she always is. I don't believe that girl was
+ever conscious of her feet and hands and blushes In all her life. I
+forget mine when I am with her.
+
+Well anyway, Father was delighted with her and showed it plainly. And
+if he liked her, he was positively funny when he met Lovelace Peyton.
+The snake-doctor came around the house, as usual galloping on the
+stick horse, and in one hand he had one of his best bottles full of
+something awful to look at and that smelled worse, even through the
+cork.
+
+"Mister," he said, looking Father gravely and courteously in the face,
+"you got cholera bad and might die to-night if you don't take medicine
+quick. It's in this bottle; shake it well." And while the Idol made a
+grab for him he put that bottle right in Father's hand and backed off
+out of reach.
+
+Roxanne was distressed at Father's having taken that awful smell into
+his hands, and Mr. Douglass tried to make him give it back to Lovelace
+Peyton; but Father wrapped it in two handkerchiefs and put it, smell
+and all, into his pocket.
+
+"Thank you, Doctor Byrd," he said, just as gravely as he talks to the
+great surgeons and doctors that come to see Mother. "Shall I report my
+condition to you to-morrow?"
+
+"That medicine will work fine," answered Lovelace Peyton; "but if it
+kills you, can I cut you open to see how you work inside? When
+Douglass dies, I'm going to cut him into little pieces; he's done
+promised."
+
+"Oh, Lovey," was all Roxanne could say, while Father and the Idol both
+roared.
+
+I never saw my father's face so lovely as it was when he looked down
+on that little raggedy boy as we left him swinging on the front gate.
+His heart is softening away from wealth to his fellow-man, I know.
+And, as if it had not made me happy enough to have Father sitting and
+smoking with such a great character as Mr. Douglass Byrd, what should
+happen but for us to meet Tony at our front gate, coming to see Father
+especially? They made me go in and wait on the front steps while they
+talked, because they didn't want me to hear; and they both laughed so
+that Father tried to get out his handkerchief and succeeded in
+dropping the awful bottle Lovelace had given him, while Tony leaned
+against the fence and shook with chuckles at Lovey's giving him such
+an awful smell. Oh, if they were to elect my father an honorary member
+of the Raccoon Patrol like the Colonel and the Idol, I could not stand
+the happiness. Tony's friendship for him gives me one of the deepest
+joys that ever came to me. Tony's high sense of honor cannot help but
+impress Father.
+
+This little town of Byrdsville, that nestles down in a hollow of the
+Old Harpeth Hills on the old pioneer road they called the Road to
+Providence, when the first settlers traveled it from Virginia to
+Tennessee, is the most wonderful place in the world, I think, and I
+wish Father could have been born and reared here, for then he wouldn't
+have strayed into a career of making money. Nobody in Byrdsville ever
+did, and Mr. Douglass Byrd will be the first one. And besides having
+the soul of honor and loving-kindness in it, Byrdsville looks like it
+might be one of the outposts of heaven, where tired souls can come to
+rest before going up the shining ladder.
+
+[Illustration: I never saw my father's face so lovely]
+
+All the houses are old-fashioned, with wide doors for welcoming and
+with vines running over the chimneys and up to the eaves, while blooms
+and buds tumble over the walls and burst from the gardens into the
+street. Yes, I think Byrdsville might be called the smile-place on the
+old earth's round face.
+
+But to return to Father and Tony at the front gate; only I didn't.
+Father went on down the street and Tony came in to sit on the steps
+and talk to me. I wouldn't be so frivolous and growny as to have a boy
+come sit on my front steps talking to me like a "suitor," as Belle
+thinks it is smart to have; but Tony is different. He's my friend, and
+I would almost as soon talk to him as Roxanne.
+
+"Well, I must say, girliky, that it was mighty considerate of you to
+be born about the full moon time of the first of May," said Tony, with
+one of those funny flares of his eyes. "Suppose you had opened your
+peepers along in December; we would have had to have an apple-roasting
+to celebrate for you, and I, for one, prefer the hay-lark. Your parent
+is one fine old boy, and me for him."
+
+"Oh, Tony, I am so glad you like Father, and it was fine of him to
+have the hay ride for me. Do you suppose they will all go?" When I
+said "all," I really meant Belle.
+
+I don't know why, but somehow I hoped this hay ride would shake up
+Belle's heart into being soft toward me. There are just eleven of us
+in the junior class in the Byrd Academy: Tony and Pink and Sam and the
+two Logan boys, while Roxanne and Mamie Sue and Belle and the two
+Willises, with me, make up the girls. Eleven is a sacred number, and I
+don't like for Belle and me to break the link by not being friends.
+
+Tony is such a wise boy that he sometimes knows what a girl is
+thinking about when she doesn't tell him. Most of the time he just
+grins and leads us all on and we do tell him everything; especially
+Mamie Sue, if we don't warn her beforehand and make her wear a
+horsehair ring not to forget when he asks her questions. It makes
+Belle mad for him to do Mamie Sue that way, and she calls it "prying";
+but I think it is just kindness. How can you sympathize with your
+friends' affairs if you don't make them tell you all? And sympathy
+applied to life is like the gasoline in a motorcar, I think.
+
+"Well, I should say they were all going," answered Tony
+enthusiastically. "Even Belle, the beauty, can hardly wait for the
+get-away. She is putting buttermilk on her freckles so that the moon
+won't see 'em. Miss Prissy is over at Roxanne's now, trying to baste
+Roxy together for the frolic."
+
+"I think Roxanne always looks lovelier than anybody," I said quickly;
+for I didn't think I could bear to have even Tony, when I know what a
+great love he has for her, criticize Roxanne's shabbiness. They don't
+any of them know what a heroine she is, and about the great cause.
+
+"Course she looks good, 'cause she is the pretty child; but I always
+feel like carrying a needle and thread and a card of pins when Roxy is
+along. And let me tell you the bug-doctor is about to burst out into
+the cold world from his aprons. I know old Doug makes enough to rag
+the family, but Roxy is just behindhand getting rabbit skins to wrap
+the buntings in. Lots of girls are poky about doing around."
+
+If Tony Luttrell had known how cruel that sounded, it would have broken
+his heart. But I couldn't tell him what a heroine Roxanne is and I just
+had to shudder in my soul to see her so misunderstood--Roxanne, whose
+every day is just one big patch on life.
+
+"It is lovely of Miss Priscilla to go with us," I said, to change the
+subject.
+
+"It would be a dry hay ride if the Miss Bubble wasn't sitting in the
+very midst of the crowd and the wagon, with the Colonel prancing along
+beside on old White. Your father is going to ride out with the Colonel
+and--but that's the surprise. Being with your gingham gang so much, I
+am about to get the talks." And Tony put his hand over his mouth and
+moved away from me as if I had the scarlet fever.
+
+I laughed at Tony and from sheer happiness at thinking that my father
+was going with us in the fine company of the Colonel and Miss
+Priscilla. I wonder what we would do, if we had to have somebody go to
+places with us who thought they had to chaperon us? Miss Prissy is
+just one of us and would go if we had to ask somebody like Belle's
+mother, for instance, who is always talking about chaperons, to go
+also.
+
+As I have remarked before, Byrdsville is a very different place from
+most of the world, and I thank God that he led me to it and "made me
+to lie down in its green pastures, beside its still waters." I found
+that in the Bible the other night, and it fitted me and Byrdsville.
+Good-night, Louise!
+
+Of course when I grow up I shall have many things happen to me, like
+graduating from Byrdsville Academy, marrying, and being president of
+clubs, and going to balls and theaters in the city, if I have to; but
+there will never be a night like this one of my sixteenth birthday,
+April twenty-second.
+
+Miss Priscilla Talbot was the first slice out of the happiness
+birthday cake when we met down at her house to get into the wagon. I
+can never have things here at my home like that, because of the
+precious sick thing upstairs that cannot be disturbed, but who is the
+core of my heart, anyway, even if she doesn't know it.
+
+But of all astonishing things, this is what Miss Priscilla did as we
+were all lined up for Father and the Colonel to help us into the wagon
+on the great mound of hay, to the front of which four horses were
+hitched.
+
+"And now to start off the birthday we must each give Phyllis a kiss,
+as we would do if we were blowing out the candies on the cake that is
+packed in the basket; and each one whisper a wish to her, as they give
+her a kiss. I will be first and the Colonel next," she said and she
+bent down and kissed me and whispered: "A happy sixteenth year."
+
+I never had been kissed--even Father never did it to me, because I
+have been more like a son than a daughter, and he hasn't thought of
+it. To get a whole wagonload of them at one time, and unaccustomed to
+them, was enough to paralyze any girl, and I stood dumb and took
+it--them, I mean. The blow-out-the-candle-with-a-kiss-wish is one of
+the first family birthday customs in Byrdsville, and I felt that it
+was right to subscribe to it. I didn't mind when I saw the boys were
+going to refuse firmly to do it and just shake hands instead.
+
+"Bully for you, Bubble, and a pound or two to cover your elbows," Tony
+exploded while he nearly pumped my arm out of the socket. Everybody
+laughed, because I _am_ getting thin with so much growing.
+
+The Colonel's kiss was a ceremonial, like you have in church or at
+graduation day, and his wish took five minutes to say, but the tall
+Willis choked up my throat with the lump by whispering a hope for my
+mother, which can never be, I know.
+
+Next the Idol kissed my hand with grace like is in a story-book and
+which made my whole arm act like a poker. Father hugged me with all
+the energy he hadn't been using on me all my life. It hurt me happily.
+
+Roxanne came last and she saved hers until the Colonel had packed us
+down together in a nest of hay at Miss Priscilla's feet like two
+kittens in a basket, with Lovelace Peyton squirming around as a third.
+
+"You never encouraged me to kiss you before, Phyllis," she whispered,
+with her arm around my neck; "but I'm going to whenever I want to
+after this, and here's a wish that we will never get separated farther
+than kissing distance, now that we have found each other."
+
+Only Lovelace Peyton kept me from crying out loud like a baby from
+happiness. He burrowed between Roxanne and me in a search for some
+peppermint he smelled in the hay, and stuck one knee right into my
+mouth to stop the sob, which was a laugh when I removed the knee for
+it to get out. My first hug around Roxanne's waist was mighty awkward,
+but I know she understood.
+
+After that the picnic unfolded its minutes in such a cloud of
+moonlight and rosy happiness, accompanied by song, that I don't know
+very well what really did happen. For once I felt that I was looking
+on life from the same exalted point of view that Roxanne always has,
+and I hope it will become a habit with me. Only I know it won't.
+
+Tony's surprise, that he had got Father to help him about, was a
+hot-air balloon that the Scout book tells them how to make, and they
+sent one up from the place we stopped at, out on Providence Road, with
+"Phyllis," cut out in great big letters and lighted with a candle
+inside, which wobbled and set the whole thing on fire before it got
+much higher than the trees. Still, it did go up and it had my name on
+it! When I got off the train in Byrdsville two months ago I couldn't
+have believed in that balloon, if it had been revealed to me in a
+vision. Do I deserve it all?
+
+One of the reasons of my rosy view was that the Idol rode upon the
+front seat of the wagon, with the farmer who drove, and smoked one of
+Father's cigars and led all the songs in the most marvelously
+beautiful voice I ever heard. He was on the Glee Club at Princeton,
+and of course to have him come to the party at all was a compliment.
+He helped Miss Priscilla and me unpack the suppers out on Tilting
+Rock, and acted only a little more grown-up than Tony and Pink, I
+don't know whether I quite liked to have him unbend so far as to throw
+a biscuit back at Tony. He is too great a man for that, and I was
+relieved when he took the Colonel's horse and started back to town,
+because he said he had something to attend to. It is more comfortable
+for me to have him on the pedestal I keep for him, than down in the
+ordinary walks of life with me and the rest of my friends--fine and
+unusual people as they all are. Also I am afraid I might betray in
+some way my great affection and veneration for him if we got too
+familiar over a pickle jar, and he might not like it. How do I know he
+wants to be enthroned and "idolized" in my heart?
+
+Yes, I was glad to see him go home early before I got so light-headed
+with happiness as to squabble over pie with Pink and put a
+lightning-bug into Tony's lemonade glass. Father went with him, and
+how good it did seem to see them ride away together through the
+moonlight down Providence Road to Byrdsville, which lay in the dim
+distance with its lights making it my huge birthday cake, decorated
+with all the lilacs and roses and redbud abloom in the Harpeth Valley.
+Some people are so accustomed to happiness that they don't even notice
+it. I'm glad I haven't had that much.
+
+One of the nice things about Miss Priscilla and the Colonel is that
+they go off and sit by themselves and entirely forget to ever say go
+home, until we have all had our fill of fun; then they begin to hurry
+at a terrible rate that gets up a pleasant excitement. They seem to
+know just the minute when we might begin to get tired, and they never
+let it come. Some people are geniuses about good times, and the
+Colonel and Miss Priscilla are two of that kind.
+
+The ride home was almost the best of all. The boys sang and gave
+Raccoon calls and practised different kinds of wood signals and ate
+the things we had saved from supper, with Mamie Sue to keep them
+company, also Lovelace Peyton, who slept part of the time with his
+head on Tony's knees, but waked up if any stray refreshments
+threatened to get past him. We all hushed at the edge of town, for the
+Colonel said it was after midnight, and he unpacked each one at his or
+her own front door so softly that not even a dog barked. He put me out
+at the cottage because he didn't want to stop the wagon in front of
+our house on account of disturbing Mother, and I went in to unfasten
+Roxanne's dress and to get mine done likewise, then I could slip home
+through the garden, which is always so lovely with the moonlight
+making ghost flowers of Roxanne's ancestral blossoms.
+
+I wish I didn't have to write you, leather Louise, what happened next,
+at the same time as the birthday, but I can't sleep unless I do. Would
+God be so cruel to me as to let me get just this one little taste of
+being happy and then take it away from me? I won't believe it!
+
+This is what happened, set down in black and white, and I can draw no
+conclusions from it. I refuse! As Roxanne and I stood in the living
+hall, under the stern old Byrd grandmother, giggling and having a
+good, girl time like I have just been learning to do, suddenly the
+door opened and the Idol stood in the light we had lighted, with his
+face so pale I thought he was going to faint.
+
+"Roxy," he said, not seeming to notice me, "you haven't been in my
+shed working with my bottles, have you? Or could Lovey have got in? I
+have the key and the window is barred, as I always keep it."
+
+"Oh, no, Douglass, I haven't been near the shed this week. My key is
+here on the hook in the left-hand bookcase," and she reached behind
+her, took it, and showed it to him. "I know Lovey hasn't been there
+either, because we can trust him on honor. Oh, what is the matter?" As
+Roxanne asked the question she was trembling all over, but not in the
+deadly cold way I was, I felt sure. She couldn't have stood it and
+lived.
+
+"Some one has been in the shed, taken samples of all my material,
+including the steel shavings that came from the last melting, and my
+notebook is gone. The process is stolen, Roxy, and all the sacrifices
+gone for nothing. I don't care for myself--but--you." His head was up
+in the same old portrait pose, but his arms trembled as he held them
+out to Roxanne.
+
+I stood still and cold and never said one word, but a pain hit into my
+heart that I didn't know I was strong enough to stand and still live.
+
+"When did you find it out?" I asked; and I was surprised at the cool
+note that sounded in my voice and made it like Father's when he talks
+business.
+
+"Just now," he answered me over Roxanne's head that was buried on his
+shoulder. "I stopped down-town to help Judge Luttrell with a brief
+that he was writing and came home only a few minutes ago. The thief
+was in the shed between the time I went on the hay ride and now. I was
+in the shed just before I started."
+
+I don't know how I said good-night to them; but I did the best I
+could, and came home through the moonlight with a great heaviness of
+heart and feet. I dreaded to see Father, and yet longed for him in a
+way I never did before in all my life. If anything awful is true, then
+he is more mine than ever. But it can't be! And when I looked for him
+I found him--in a way I never had before. He was standing at my
+mother's door and the great big man was crying just like a girl, with
+his shoulders shaking and big sobs coming.
+
+"Bess, Bess," he sobbed Mother's name under his breath, "she's going
+to be a grown woman and I don't know what to do without you. Ten long
+years. Oh, Bess!"
+
+Yes, I suppose I'm nearer a grown woman than most girls of my age, and
+I'm tall enough to take a big man in my arms, which are so long and
+thin as to be a joke, and hold him close enough to make the sobs stop
+coming.
+
+"Now, Phil, I leave it to you if you are not enough to upset any man,
+with your moonlight picnics and folderols," Father said, in just a few
+seconds from the time I hugged him up. He was both laughing and
+sniffling into his handkerchief at the same time, and I had a lovely
+Lovelace Peyton feeling about him, because he looked so young and
+ashamed of himself for being caught crying.
+
+"I'm just as much your son as I ever was, Father," I said with a gulp
+and a lump in my own throat. "I'm never going to be a daughter, if you
+don't want one."
+
+"I do, Phyllis, I do; but I want the son-girl sometimes, too. You go
+to bed." And with a sound hug that nearly broke my ribs, as neither he
+nor I were used to them, he went into his room and shut his door
+decidedly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+A serious disposition can make more trouble for itself by its own
+seriousness than all the misfortunes that come can make for it. If I
+had just a little touch of Roxanne Byrd's foamy spirits, I would be a
+much more comfortable companion for myself. All night I lay awake,
+anchored in the middle of the huge old Byrd bedstead, and sorrowed
+over the misfortune that had come to Roxanne and the Idol. Over and
+over I went in my mind to see where I could clear Mr. Rogers of my
+suspicions until my thoughts were so pale in color that I could hardly
+make them out, and at last I fell asleep in despair.
+
+In the morning I dressed so slowly that it was nine o'clock before I
+was buttoned into my dress and felt that I could go over and help
+Roxanne bear the calamity. It was Saturday, so I knew she would need
+help in doing all the things she leaves undone until this blessed day
+of relief from school cares and responsibilities comes.
+
+It is strange how ignorant one can be of the disposition of the very
+person she loves best on earth. Did I find Roxanne Byrd dissolved in
+an indigo sea on the day after she had lost a huge fortune? Not at
+all! She was floating still higher on a still more rosy cloud and
+eating a large slice of the most delicious nut cake, while Lovelace
+Peyton did likewise.
+
+"Oh, Phyllis, I was just going to call you to get a piece of Uncle
+Pompey's nut cake before it gets cold. It is famous in Byrdsville, and
+I've been dying to have one made to give you ever since you came; only
+I couldn't get the materials. It takes every good thing in a grocery,
+from ginger to preserved cherries, to go in it, and it is best hot.
+Uncle Pompey said for me to wait until the second pan came out of the
+stove to call you, because it is always best. He has out the Sheffield
+tray with the old point cover on it and one of great-grandmother
+Byrd's willow plates to put it on for you. I'll let him bring it to
+you and see you taste it. Poor Uncle Pompey is a famous cook, and
+economy has been agony to him. I'm going to let him make every good
+thing he wants to this week. He has been held down so long." Roxanne
+bubbled along like a lovely mountain torrent of cheerfulness, while I
+stood rooted to the spot in an astonishment that I could not conceal.
+
+"Oh, Roxanne," I said weakly, as I sank into a chair.
+
+"Yes, Phyllis, I suppose it is funny to see me enjoying the cake like
+this after what happened last night; but the Byrds always make other
+plans as soon as anything happens to the first one. Douglass and I
+decided to rest from the steel invention by having things we want for
+two or three months, and then he knows something greater to invent
+than steel could ever be. He hasn't told me yet, but I'll tell you
+when he does. Oh, there's Uncle Pompey with the cake. It's lovely,
+isn't it, Phyllis?"
+
+If a person went to a funeral and met the dead friend at the door
+handing her a piece of cake, I suppose she would feel about like I did
+when that funny old black man handed me that lovely and elegant tray
+with a grin on his face so wide that it is a wonder it didn't meet
+itself at the back of his head. I wonder to this moment where I got
+the enthusiasm with which I accepted it.
+
+"Eat all you want to, Phyllis, 'cause I've got a good plaster to put
+on the place when the ache comes," Lovelace Peyton advised from his
+seat on the floor where he was alternately eating his piece of cake
+and rolling black pills from the crumbs that he caught in a pasteboard
+box.
+
+And as I sat and munched that piece of historic Byrd cookery my brain
+turned over in my head and settled itself in a new way. My whole
+nature underwent a revolution. I saw that a person can either accept
+life as a piece of fluffy cake when it is handed to her or look on it
+all as--soggy. I'm going to follow Roxanne's example after this and
+see the fluffiness of the cake determinedly.
+
+"And, Phyllis, I'll tell you what else I'm going to do," continued
+Roxanne, rocking and nibbling and smiling so that I would like to have
+eaten her up, from shabby shoes to the curl down the back of the neck.
+"When I went down to the grocery before breakfast to get the things to
+console Uncle Pompey after we had told him about the robbery, I saw
+the loveliest blue muslin in the window at Mr. Hadley's store, and I
+'in going to buy it to-day and make me a dress for commencement. I had
+expected to wear the family linen, but Douglass says let's spend all
+his salary this month in having things we want; so the blue muslin
+will be my part. Do you think blue will be prettier than pink, or
+would you have--?"
+
+But just here we were interrupted by Tony's appearance at the door,
+and the expression on his face matched the one I had had of condolence
+as I came over through the garden; but he has known Roxanne longer
+than I have and boys' minds are supposed to be stronger than
+girls'--privately I don't think they are--so he accepted the situation
+and the cake with more grace than I had.
+
+However he was cruelly insistent about questioning and talking about
+the robbery. The Idol had told him about it as Tony walked out to the
+furnace with him, which is a Saturday habit with Tony as the Jonathan
+to Mr. Douglass. Tony had known all along about the steel, but was
+surprised to know that I had been able to keep it to myself. I suppose
+it is best never to notice an unconscious insult, and boys are often
+that way with girls.
+
+"Doug and I both think that this is not the first time the robber has
+been in or around the shed," Tony said thoughtfully. "Do you remember
+that shadow we saw dodge through the yard the evening we came from the
+Raccoon outing, Phyllis?"
+
+"Yes," I answered; and the uneasy feeling I had about Mr. Rogers that
+night so I couldn't sleep slightly tipped the rosy cloud I had decided
+to climb upon and stay upon forever. "But it may have been Uncle
+Pompey, like I thought it was," I added hopefully.
+
+"Well, Doug told me to come and nose around and see what I could find
+in the way of clues. Want to come out and have a look with me? You two
+Palefaces might as well learn something about gumshoeing a villain now
+as ever."
+
+Lots of boys, and grown-up people for that matter, like to keep
+interesting things and doings to themselves; but Tony Luttrell is as
+generous in disposition as he is in mouth.
+
+We went out to the shed with him, and Lovelace Peyton went too, but
+refused to come in the shed door because he said he was still on honor
+to the Idol, no matter what Roxanne said, not to come nearer than one
+yard, which was marked with sticks all around the shed. It was funny
+to see the snake-doctor lean across the dead-line and crane his sweet
+little neck to try to hear and see Tony inside the shed. And after
+Tony had squinted at and touched and nosed almost every inch of the
+shed, he came out with his hands in his pockets.
+
+"Any clue?" asked Roxanne, as anxiously as Roxanne could ask about
+anything from the cloud.
+
+"N--o," he said in a hesitating sort of way that seemed just as
+professional as the way the detectives talk in the wonderful stories
+in the magazines that my governess always reproved me for reading.
+"That was a slick artist who got away on greased heels, but there is
+a--smell in there that I've never felt before in the shed. And yet I
+have met it somewhere, I feel certain. It seems to my nose somewhat
+like the bug-doctor at his worst."
+
+"No, Tony," said Lovelace Peyton, positively but perfectly calmly, "I
+ain't been in that shed and my bottles ain't got legs."
+
+We all laughed and came to the house--but I had got a whiff of that
+odor and I knew where I had met it before. It was raw onion and tar,
+and it was the mixture that Lovelace Peyton had given Father in the
+bottle he wrapped in his handkerchief and put in his pocket. I felt
+weak all over for a second, but I immediately remembered my duty to
+respect my father even in my thoughts. I had decided that in the
+watches of last night, after I had found his heart and hugged it up
+outside of Mother's door.
+
+In the first place, I had no business to read those magazines that my
+governess told me not to, even if she did have so little sense that
+her brain must have been made of tatting work originally, which she
+was always doing by the yard. And while the explanation of what an
+evil it is to get millions and millions of dollars together when the
+poor have so little, and that no man who has a human heart in his
+breast would want to do it is perfectly true, still that man who wrote
+the article might not have known about my father. I can see how a man
+might go on for years and do a great wrong to his brother man and
+really not realize what a monster it makes of him. I believe my father
+is just blind on that side of things like some people are in one eye.
+I pray God that he may wake up sometime, and die happy but poor! Of
+course, I know he had nothing to do with taking the steel secret, and
+I am going to get on the cloud again and not worry over Roxanne's
+troubles until she needs something; and then I will come down and get
+it for her while she stays in the air,--if I can.
+
+[Illustration: Tony ... nosed almost every inch of the shed]
+
+The really important things in a person's life underlie the daily
+occurrence like the sand that is at the bottom of the rose-bushes.
+School is the sand-bank of a girl's life, rather heavy, but supporting
+the roses of debates and picnics and commencement and expression
+impersonations like the one Friday night is to be.
+
+Of course Byrd Academy graduated Judge Luttrell and the Colonel and
+Roxanne's Father as well as Miss Prissy, and all the other learned
+ladies in the Browning Society; but for all its historical antiquity,
+it is one of the most advanced places of learning in the South, and
+mostly on account of the progressiveness of the Junior Class, which is
+Tony and Roxanne and the rest of us.
+
+The Senior Class this year is a great failure, because all are girls
+but the Petway boy, who is terribly feminine, and crochets his own
+silk ties, Tony says. I don't approve of the seniors at all, and both
+Roxanne and I are worried over the way Helena Kirby, Belle's sister,
+will insist on talking to the Idol when we come out of church. We both
+know how important it is for a great man to have lady friends that are
+great enough to appreciate him. Of course, Helena can only admire his
+wonderful eyes, which makes no difference to us at all, for she could
+never gauge his high soul and genius. Roxanne says she trusts to the
+patches on his trousers to keep him from going to walk with her and
+from sitting on her front steps. Oh, if we just can keep him pure from
+prosperity in the shape of new clothes until he makes this second
+great invention, we will be so thankful, I encourage Roxanne to spend
+the money on food and her own clothes, so he will not be able to buy a
+new suit. We feel so safe with him mortifyingly shabby.
+
+"Oh, Douglass is never going to be in love or marry anybody," said
+Roxanne when we were speculating on why Helena would flirt her eyes so
+at him. "I feel perfectly sure we'll have him always."
+
+I felt relieved that Roxanne felt that way, but I had to remind myself
+often of her rose-cloud disposition and watch carefully to see that no
+troubles that I can avert--like Helena Kirby--shall come to her or the
+Idol.
+
+But I started on the subject of the impersonations that the Expression
+Class of Juniors is to give the last day of April, before the whole
+academy is turned over to the affairs of the Seniors, like graduation
+essays being practised from morning to night until you speak each one
+in your own dreams. This is the first time they ever had such a thing
+in the academy, and the whole town is as excited and interested as it
+well can be.
+
+Mr. Douglass Byrd thought it all up a month ago for us Juniors because
+of our Senior oppression and after his great loss he went on just the
+same helping us practise and seemed to be as interested in us as if we
+had been explosives in a bottle or a test-tube or a retort. His great
+serenity of soul is a constant lesson to me. Good-night, Louise. You
+are a comfort; you settle my thoughts, though just of leather.
+
+This is the night of the impersonations and they are over. It was one
+of the greatest triumphs ever experienced at the Byrd Academy. It will
+probably be mentioned in the future with the same praise as the
+Colonel's valedictory that left not a dry eye in the house, because
+they all knew that all the boys in the Senior Class of sixty-one would
+go to the war the next week. I choke up whenever I hear the Colonel
+tell of it, as I have many times in these last two months of my life
+in Byrdsville. Miss Prissy always cries copiously when he gets to the
+place where she gave him a flower when he had walked home with
+her--she only fourteen years old and in short dresses--and which he
+wore in battle in his pocket Bible. What would she do if she should
+lose the Colonel by sudden death before she has rewarded his
+affections by marrying him? She ought to think of that.
+
+Belle did beautifully, first on the program, dressed up in grown
+clothes and having a Byrdsville society conversation over an imaginary
+telephone. It sounded just like Helena, and I thought it was not very
+nice of her to impersonate her own sister, but it was a comfort to see
+how the Idol enjoyed it. If he liked Helena to any extent, he would
+have displayed indignation. Instead the corners of his mouth twitched
+for minutes afterward. I believe at some time Helena must have
+telephoned him.
+
+Mamie Sue did a delicious old lady telling about her grandson to the
+two Willises, who were company to tea, that made Hie audience shake
+with jollity. There was a perfectly darling trace of Miss Priscilla in
+the way she did it, that made the Colonel almost unable to keep his
+seat, and Miss Priscilla laughed out loud twice. The affection I bear
+Mamie Sue fattens in my heart at the same rate the object does in real
+life.
+
+"The way the two Willises impersonated their own silence was a triumph
+of art," the Idol said in my ear after it was over. It embarrassed me
+greatly to have him be obliged to crowd into a seat with Lovelace
+Peyton and me, but it was crowded everywhere else, too. If I had had
+my way he would have had the best seat in the house, comfortably
+alone.
+
+Sam Hayes was "Old Hickory," General Andrew Jackson, the night before
+the battle of New Orleans. Mr. Douglass Byrd wrote his piece and Judge
+Luttrell, who is the son of one of that famous Tennessee hero's best
+friends and staff-officers, was so affected he blew his nose
+feelingly.
+
+Pink would be a negro, so as for once to be rid--by the aid of burnt
+cork--of the disgrace of his unmasculine beauty, and he was so like
+Uncle Pompey that Lovelace Peyton insisted on calling out to him from
+the second seat until Pink had to tell him who he was before he could
+go on with his hen story, which was one of Uncle Pompey's own, and
+which was rib-aching funny.
+
+Tony and Roxanne did the most interesting real Scout adventure,
+without words, and the audience sat spellbound while she fainted from
+heat prostration, and he put around her head a wet bandage made with
+his and her handkerchief, raised a signal for other Scouts to come and
+help, and finally took her up on his back and carried her off the
+platform behind the curtain. The applause was deafening, though
+Lovelace Peyton didn't like the scene one bit, and he kept feeling
+Roxanne's head after she came and sat down in front of us in the
+audience.
+
+Nobody knew that I was going to be or do a thing, for I had begged
+them not to make me, because of the difficulty I have in managing my
+feet and elbows on account of their rapid growth right now. But I did!
+I think I have caught the family pride habit and that is what made me
+do it. This is how I felt. I looked down at the seats of honor
+reserved for the Byrdsville distinguished citizens, and saw my father
+sitting in one of the high places, as it were, between Judge Luttrell
+and Mr. Chadwell, and his face was just beaming with enjoyment of the
+way all those other men's sons and daughters were distinguishing
+themselves with their beauty and talent. And then out in the audience
+Judge Luttrell had Tony's mother, dressed in lovely black silk and
+also full of pride, while Mr. Chadwell kept nodding to Pink's mother
+at everything that Pink did, like there never had been a negro
+minstrel before. I thought of Father being the only lonely one up on
+the platform and with only me to be a credit to him--and me not doing
+it. I prayed for an immediate plan and as I prayed, as is my custom, I
+acted. I asked Mr. Douglass Byrd quick, if there was time for me to do
+an impersonation, and he answered with the most wonderfully
+encouraging smile:
+
+"Go ahead, Miss Phyllis, and you can heat them all."
+
+Now, the only person in the world I could ever be like is my own self,
+or Father himself, and as I sat and looked at him the idea came. Last
+year the governess took me to hear Father make a speech when he
+presented a library building to the college from which he graduated.
+It was such a fine one and full of so much humor and pathos, as all
+speeches should be to hold the attention of an audience, that it was
+published in all the papers in New York, and I learned it by heart
+from pride over it. That was what I impersonated--my own father with
+him looking on!
+
+All the others had had costumes and burnt cork and things to help
+them; but I had on a pink flowered organdie and pink slippers with a
+huge pink bow on my head, and my looks were all dead against my
+success. But I did succeed! I knew I would when I took my stand and
+looked down into Father's surprised and alarmed face. I shrugged my
+shoulders in my dress just as he did in his dress coat, dropped my
+head on one side, and pursed my mouth up on the left corner and let my
+right eye droop as his does. Then I began--and for that five minutes I
+_was_ Father. The speech just rolled off my eloquent tongue and
+the people laughed in the right places, just as the people at the
+college did, and the Colonel blew his nose like a trumpet when I said
+the short sentences about the memorial table to be put in the hallway
+to the "fellows who have gone," while the end-up, with its funny
+little dedication to the immortals bound in leather that would live on
+the library shelf and the ones hound in serge and corduroy that would
+sit at the tables in reading-room, brought the storm of applause that
+sounded like a tornado.
+
+When I stopped being Father and came to my own self I was sitting
+beside the Idol in the audience and watching Judge Luttrell slap
+Father on the back and Mr. Chadwell laughing so that he and the
+Colonel looked like jolly, bald-headed boys. Mr. Chadwell is as
+disgracefully handsome as Pink, and doesn't look much older. And I
+never saw my father's face look like it did to-night, and I had never
+hoped to see him in a position that fitted him like the one on the
+platform with Byrdsville's distinguished citizens. I ought to be a
+happy girl, and I am.
+
+Only Tony Luttrell troubles me, he is so quiet for him; and when he
+walked home with me, he was as gentle and affectionate to me as if I
+had been sick. Could something be the matter with me and I not know
+it? I felt like I did when the secret was first stolen two weeks ago,
+though Roxanne and the Idol seem to have forgotten all about it and
+nobody else knows.
+
+There is such a lovely moon out over the garden that I can't put out
+the light and go to bed, though I saw Roxanne put hers out a half-hour
+ago. I wonder why I ever started a record of myself and my friends
+like I am doing? But I'm glad I did; for as I turn each leaf of you,
+leather Louise, things seem to get brighter and happier for me, and as
+I look at all these clean sheets in the future I wonder what I can
+find to make them as lovely as the happenings on the others have been.
+I'm thankful for the air that makes Mother sleep, and for the moral
+surroundings for Father, and for the loving-kindness of my
+fellow-men--girls and boys--to me. Yes, I realize that being beloved
+is a novelty to me, but I know better than to think it will ever wear
+off--the pleasures of it, I mean. Good-night!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+When you live in the city, or various cities, as I have done, you have
+various things that distract your attention from the miracle that is
+spreading all over the earth when the spring comes. Do such things
+happen every spring, or is it just something that has unblinded my
+eyes? Maybe I have really caught that rosy hue habit from Roxanne; but
+the apple-trees this week have been almost too much for me. There are
+great, gnarly, old apple-trees in every spare corner of Byrdsville,
+where you wouldn't even expect a tree to be; and ever since I have
+been in this town I have been finding a new one stretching out its
+crooked old arms to me as if to welcome me or bar my path. There is
+one that grows half in and half out of Judge Luttrell's yard, so the
+fence has to consider it a kind of post and stop at it to begin again
+on the other side, while three of them are trying to completely close
+up the door of the court-house on the Public Square. All the streets
+are bordered with them, set along at ragged intervals with the tall
+old maples, and all the gardens and yards have regiments of them
+camped about the doors and walks.
+
+Three nights ago I went to sleep in a nice orderly old town, and I
+awoke the next morning in the middle of a great white and pink and
+green bouquet, which must smell up at least to the first of the seven
+heavens, and which is buzzing so with bees that it sounds like an
+orchestra getting ready to burst out into some kind of a new, great
+hymn. And everybody in Byrdsville is buzzing around in a chorus with
+the bees, cleaning house and going visiting and shopping at the stores
+down on the Square. I am as industriously doing likewise as I can, and
+have bought things from almost everybody until my brain is feeble from
+trying to think up things to ask for in the different stores. Oh, the
+things I could buy if Roxanne would just let me!
+
+One trouble is, there are no really poor people in Byrdsville, and
+those on the verge of it are taken care of by the different church
+societies, which look after them so carefully that they come very near
+stepping on each others' toes. The incident of old Mr. and Mrs.
+Satterwhite came near being a case in point. Mr. Satterwhite has
+always been a Presbyterian, and Mrs. Satterwhite disagreed with her
+husband seriously enough to be a Methodist. They have no children and
+have been getting poorer and poorer, though keeping both honest and
+good, except for their religious differences. When the cold weather
+came this winter, they had no coal to keep their respective
+rheumatisms warm and they nearly froze to death arguing about which
+one of their respective church societies they should ask help from;
+and when they were both chattering cold they compromised on asking
+both. Then they got two loads of coal, which was more than they
+needed, and which offended both societies, so that when they asked for
+some kindling to light the fire with, both societies said let the
+other one send it. They had to sit up all night by turn for the rest
+of the winter to keep the fire, for fear it would go out while they
+were asleep.
+
+Roxanne and I were terribly distressed that such a hard thing as being
+night watchman should happen to those old people, but the Idol said it
+was just as well that one should sleep while the other watched, so
+that they wouldn't have any mutual time to discuss religion. That was
+a very practical view for a genius to take of the question and I was
+surprised at him.
+
+And while the situation looks very bad for churches to get into, it
+has been fortunate for me. I have been able to buy a lot of things at
+all the stores for them, because I am an Episcopalian, and just one
+girl can't be considered a church society. I'm the only one of my kind
+in town. Roxanne has helped me and we have bought with discretion as
+well as liberality, I think. After we had bought all the groceries
+Uncle Pompey could suggest to us, and in quantities as large as would
+go into all the corners of the kitchen of the Satterwhites' little
+cottage, we began to make the house as beautiful as we thought those
+good old people deserved, never having had anything beautiful in all
+their lives before.
+
+First, we put the most expensive paper on all the walls, because we
+found that the largest-flowered paper was what we needed, and it
+happened to be a special kind that the paper man had to order by
+telegram to be sent by express; for neither we, nor those old people
+who are approaching the ends of their lives, could afford to wait. It
+looked lovely when it was all on and it matched the velvet carpets,
+which also had big flowers, good and gay.
+
+Of course, both Roxanne and I know better than to choose plush
+furniture, but that was what Mrs. Satterwhite wanted, and they were
+going to live in the cottage, not us. Father was pleased when I told
+him what a big bill there would be at the furniture man's and said:
+
+"Good for you, Phil. I didn't think you could do so well as that."
+
+It took nearly two weeks of all our spare time, with Mamie Sue, when
+she could escape Belle, helping and Tony occasionally, to get the
+Satterwhites settled in their luxury; and then I decided to ask them
+both seriously and separately if there was another desire of their
+hearts left ungratified.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Satterwhite, as he stretched his feet in his new
+velvet slippers that matched the carpet in that room, "I'd like a
+nice, new Methody hymn-book to be put on the table for the old lady to
+read outen on Sunday evenings."
+
+It was a glorious thing to think that Father's money, ill-gotten as it
+is, could settle the church society quarrel; and I was so delighted
+that I am afraid I showed excitement when I went into the kitchen to
+ask Mrs. Satterwhite what she would like best now that the needs were
+all satisfied.
+
+"Miss Phyllis, child, there is only one thing on earth I can think
+of to want. I would like to have a year's subscription to the
+_Presbyterian Observer_ to read to Pa on Sunday nights, like I used
+to when we was young and strong and working enough to afford the two
+dollars." Remember, leather Louise, he is the Presbyterian and she is
+the Methodist, so this was permanent reconciliation.
+
+My emotions are such that I can't write further about this incident,
+but I wish I could picture Father's face when I told him about it,
+'though still he wasn't satisfied and said spend some more. How could
+I in a place where everybody had what they wanted and money is not
+needed to make them enjoy life?
+
+My trouble was serious and I have had to confess to Roxanne about it.
+
+"I wish I could give all the girls and boys in the class a nice
+present for some reason I haven't got," I said wistfully. "To Belle
+especially, for she has been so pleasantly not unpleasant to me for
+the last two weeks."
+
+"Yes, it is a pity, if you have to spend all that money in getting
+other people what they want, that you can't get Belle's permanent
+pleasantness. It is something that would do us all good," answered
+Roxanne, with the sympathy that I always find in her.
+
+"Friendship that you have to buy would not be very valuable, generally
+speaking," I answered, as I shook my brain for a plan. "But on the
+other hand," I continued, "some people can see friendship in the form
+of a present when they can't feel it from the heart. Belle is that
+kind, and that is not my fault. What I want to find is a 'tie to bind
+her'--speaking hymnally."
+
+"Yes, you are right, Phyllis," answered Roxanne thoughtfully, as she
+and I both began to sew some little hand-made tucks that are to trim
+the waist of the lovely blue muslin that Roxanne bought herself, to
+our great joy. "I do wish we could think up something that would make
+Belle understand how you appreciate her and--"
+
+But just here the Idol came and stood in the door with Lovelace Peyton
+on his shoulder, whom he let slide down him to the floor. Now, a month
+ago, I would rather have had anything happen to me than to sit in the
+presence of Mr. Douglass Byrd, but all that reverential awe has
+gone--changed, the awe gone and only reverence left. As we feared, he
+has bought the new spring clothes, but we see no alarming signs of
+affection toward Helena Kirby yet developed by them. How magnificent
+he is in them, is beyond my pen to describe to you, Louise.
+
+"What has Miss Belle done that needs an expression of appreciation on
+just this particular day of May?" he asked, with that delightful
+interest he always shows in all of us--Roxanne's friends.
+
+And while it is trying in a way to girls whose dresses are still just
+at their shoe tops to be called "Miss," we never resent it from him,
+because it denotes real respect and not teasing like it does from some
+of our friends and older relations. It is a very thin line that
+separates ridicule from affectionate interest in girls of our age, but
+he is always on the right side.
+
+"The reason Phyllis wants to do something nice for Belle is that she
+has the kind of disposition that requires more to make her a friend
+than the rest of us. It has to be something that will shock her into
+seeing how fond of her Phyllis is." Roxanne's explanation was so well
+expressed that the Idol saw the point and reason immediately.
+
+"You want to throw a kind of bombshell friendship into the camp of her
+prejudices, Miss Phyllis," he said with his mouth twitching with a
+laugh, as if he didn't know whether we would like it or not.
+
+"Yes, that is just what I want--an explosion, and I can't think of
+anything but a gold bracelet or a ring, neither of which is a
+skyrocket," I answered with the flow of wit that always comes in the
+presence of the Idol, and which, I am sure, is just a reflection of
+his genius.
+
+"I know a explode that I can git you, Phyllie," said Lovelace Peyton,
+looking up from the bottle he was trying to get into his apron pocket,
+his attention having been caught by the word that interested his
+scientific mind.
+
+"Not the kind Miss Phyllis wants, bug-doctor," the Idol answered with
+a laugh, as he filled his bag with tobacco that he keeps in a queer
+old jar which the Douglass grandfathers brought from England before
+the Revolution.
+
+"I _kin_ git a 'splode that Phyllie wants," answered Lovelace
+Peyton indignantly. "Phyllie always wants what I git her, even
+squirms; don't you, Phyllie?"
+
+"Yes, I do," I answered quickly, for I can't even write how precious
+to me is the way Lovelace Peyton treats me with confidence. He comes
+to me now just as he goes to Roxanne for things he wants, strings or
+sympathy, and I keep a supply of both on hand for him. And when he
+brings dreadful bugs and things I never let my heart quake--that is,
+so he will notice it. A woolly caterpillar was the last test that I
+stood for him.
+
+"I think, however," said the Idol as he prepared to go on back to the
+office, since he had only come up to the court-house on an errand
+about something, "I think if I were you, Miss Phyllis, I would try a
+quiet little gold bracelet. Believe me, it will work."
+
+You have to consider the source of advice like you do that of the
+water you drink, and then act accordingly. If Mr. Douglass Byrd
+advised me to buy one of my friends a gold bracelet, I ought not to
+hesitate any longer than it takes to put on a hat and get my
+pocketbook. Besides, I hadn't got a single thing from Mr. Snider, who
+keeps the jewelry shop and the cigar stand at the same time in the
+same shop. He was very cordial and glad to see Roxanne and me, and
+tried to stretch out the attractiveness of his few jewels in a most
+surprising way. He had two gold bracelets in stock, one plain and the
+other with a red set in it that he thought was a ruby, but I knew it
+to be a garnet. The plain one was really lovely, but I knew the other
+would suit Belle better.
+
+When Roxanne tried on the plain one, her lovely dark eyes just
+sparkled, and I could see how she loved it; but I had had my
+experience with the Byrds' pride and I didn't even offer it to her. My
+self-denial brought its reward. There were two little beauty pins just
+alike with small pearls set along the bar. I bought them both. First,
+I pinned one in the tie of my middy and then, with stern
+determination, I handed one to Roxanne. She looked at me doubtfully,
+then blushed and pinned hers in exactly the same spot on the collar of
+her middy, which had been made to match mine since the temporary
+easing of their financial strain. If she had defied me, I don't know
+what I should have done, but I gave her a squeeze that was the most
+graceful one I have ever accomplished since I have commenced to
+practise demonstrations. No hero or ambassador ever felt so proud of a
+decoration on his own chest as I did of that pin on Roxanne's. It is a
+triumph for one person to be able to make friends despite another's
+haughtiness and I felt that even the old portrait grandmother would
+have been glad to have Roxanne make me so happy.
+
+Then I had an addition to my first plan. Ideas have a way of splitting
+off and multiplying themselves like jellyfish do in the natural
+history, if they are in favorable environment. I asked Mr. Snider to
+set all the jewelry trays upon the counter again; and beginning at the
+first one, I bought a nice token of my regard for all eleven of my
+class at the Byrd Academy.
+
+"Now, Roxanne," I said as I left the store, "I know that this action
+of mine looks very vulgarly rich, and if anybody did it to me I would
+be as mad as Tony and all the rest will be if I offer them this
+jewelry without an explanation. But Mr. Snider and the seven children
+he has are enough to excuse any amount of vulgarity. Cigars and
+jewelry are very little for that large family to thrive on, and that
+was forty-five dollars I spent. I should think my friends would
+sympathize with me in having to get rid of this money in a sensible
+and charitable way, enough to take the tokens without any indignation
+when I explain it to them. Don't you think so?
+
+"Oh, Phyllis," said Roxanne, with the affection in her voice that I
+hope I am never going to get accustomed to, "nobody would refuse to do
+just like you want them to; and if they thought they could, you would
+make them see that it would be mean to do it. They will all be
+delighted with the presents. Can't you see Mamie Sue turning that ring
+around and around on her finger?"
+
+I had bought a ring with a lovely green set in it for Mamie Sue in
+memory of the many horsehair ones she has had to wear to piece out her
+memory, which must be fat and lazy like she is herself. I am going to
+make my presentation apologies to them all tomorrow while we eat lunch
+out on the flat rock in the academy yard. Sometimes we take a double
+lunch and invite the boys to come over and share it with us. Roxanne
+and I have planned to do this. She is going to let Uncle Pompey make
+some one of his favorites for us. She is still indulging him in
+cooking materials, but thinks she will have to begin to starve again
+on June first. The new invention has got as far as needing some
+chemicals already. But it is best to climb away from an evil day upon
+the ever convenient rosy cloud and that is what we did as we walked
+along toward home.
+
+But a strange thing happened, and funny, too. I'm blushing over my
+awkwardness even as I write just to you, leather Louise. But isn't it
+enough to make me blush to think of that scarf-pin, with the moonstone
+and pearl in it, that I got to give Pink, sticking in the Idol's
+necktie, if he hasn't already taken it off to go to bed? This is how it
+happened. As we came along the street, almost as far as to Miss
+Priscilla's, we met Tony and Mr. Douglass Byrd coming into town. I
+never saw two people as much excited as they both were, and when they
+saw us they stopped talking and looked at us like we were a surprise to
+them. For a minute I was startled, for I thought I heard Mr. Roger's
+name spoken excitedly by Tony; and I have never got over the uneasiness
+about him, though the great secret robbery is a thing of two weeks
+past. I can't help anxiously wondering what they were talking about.
+They stopped, and so did we, and of course Tony's Scout eyes landed
+right on those twin pins Roxanne and I were wearing; and before I could
+stop her Roxanne had told him about the present-luncheon out on the
+flat rock to-morrow, and Snider and how I _had_ to spend money. I
+thought Tony was going to laugh and joke about it, as his former
+conduct would have been; but he got red in the face, shook as I put his
+pin into the lapel of his coat and spoke to me as if I were ill and
+needed sympathy, like he has been doing for a week. That was upsetting
+enough; but when the Idol looked at me with real affection beaming from
+his glorious eyes and said:
+
+"Don't I get a jewel, too, Miss Phyllis?" I almost doubled up into a
+heap on the pavement, and it was Roxanne who came to my rescue and
+held all of them out for him to take his choice. He took the one I
+would rather have him take--a beautiful pearl, like my friendship is
+for him, shadowed by the moonstone, which is my unworthiness.
+
+I'll go down early in the morning and get another pin for Pink. I wish
+Father was here so I could tell him about Mr. Snider and how glad he
+was to get the money. "Tainted money" were the words the magazine
+used--wouldn't feeding hungry little children take the taint off the
+money and the people who gave it? I believe so. I wish I had all
+Father's money to give away and he had to work for all we get, at
+something like being a lawyer or a doctor. This had been a lovely day,
+and I'm thankful for my happiness. Good-night!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, why aren't people more careful about what they say before
+children, who can't always understand all that things mean! I will
+never forgive myself for bringing this awful thing down on Roxanne and
+her family as long as I live, though Mr. Douglass Byrd says it was not
+my fault at all. He was the one that called the present for Belle an
+explosion, and so put the idea into Lovelace Peyton's mind. Nobody
+knows yet just exactly what did happen or how bad his eyes are hurt,
+but the light of all the world is going out for me if Lovelace Peyton
+is going blind so he never can be the famous doctor he was born to be.
+
+Old Uncle Pompey has been gasping with asthma in the kitchen since
+morning, and all he can tell is that Lovelace Peyton had taken some
+kerosene out of the can on the back porch, be thought to just mix with
+onions and other things he often uses to make medicines. Suddenly he
+heard an explosion in the back yard and ran out to find Lovelace
+Peyton's face all burned and him insensible. When Roxanne got to him
+he just moaned that he was making an explosion for me, and then the
+doctor gave him something to keep him from suffering with the burn
+while he dressed it. They can't tell about the eyes as yet.
+
+[Illustration: He just moaned that he was making an explosion]
+
+Miss Prissy is with Roxanne, and they won't let me stay all night, so
+I had to come home. Roxanne just won't believe that he won't get all
+right, neither will Mr. Douglass Byrd. He was lovelier than ever to
+me, but with that same kind of flavor in his kindness that he and Tony
+both had yesterday. What can they be pitying me about?
+
+Father has been away a week and I am so sorry. I have just written to
+him about the accident, and I know he will be distressed, for he was
+as fond of Lovelace as of anybody he knew. I believe he'll come right
+home.
+
+How can I go to sleep and wait until morning to know if those lovely,
+blue, little-boy eyes will never look up at me again? What can I do to
+ease this awful anxiety? As if I didn't know what to do when I have
+heard so often about a Person who watches every sparrow's flight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+These few days have been the most wonderful I have ever spent in all
+my life, the saddest and the most deeply happy. When a person's
+friends are in trouble, it is one time you can let your heart go its
+own pace no matter where it carries you, and for once I have had my
+way about pouring out my affection on the Byrds.
+
+Lovelace Peyton is not going to die from his dreadful burns, the
+doctors say; but as yet they can't tell about his eyes. They don't
+dare remove the bandages, and whether or not he can see cannot be
+decided for a week or more. He has to stay in a dark room and be very
+quiet, and it is like trying to prove that impossible is possible to
+persuade him into lying in his bed in Roxanne's room, while we exert
+ourselves to the point of desperation to keep him happy and amused.
+
+Since the accident Roxanne and I have just ignored the Byrd ancestors,
+and I bring whatever I choose across the garden into the cottage to
+Lovelace Peyton. In the first place, he wouldn't eat without me, and
+kept asking for things I had given him to eat; so I had to tell
+Roxanne about my dishonesty in feeding him like I had been doing, and
+she was so glad that he was fat and in good condition to stand the
+strain of his accident that she forgave me with her arms around my
+neck.
+
+I wish I could put down in black and white between your brown covers,
+leather Louise, how happy it makes me to sit by that squirming,
+bandaged little boy, and feed him out of one of his thin ancestral
+spoons. Not one thing will he eat without me. I believe he knows how
+happy it makes me, and frets for me just for that special reason. That
+and the fact that he expects things of me made me think up the idea
+that has helped us through the awfulness of the days that we had to
+keep him quiet.
+
+Lovelace Peyton is not like the little boy to whom you can tell
+stories about bears and Little Red Ridinghood and Goldilocks in
+ordinary form. He'll listen to it a few minutes, and then when you
+come to the point where the grandmother is ill for Little Red
+Ridinghood to go and visit, he stops and wants to know exactly what
+was the matter with her; and if you say you don't know, he turns over
+on his pillow and won't listen to the rest of it.
+
+"Why don't folks write in books what diseases other folks have got,
+Phyllie?" he asked fretfully when I told him about Tiny Tim and the
+"Christmas Carol." "Do you reckon that little boy had rheumatiz and
+didn't know any plaster for it?"
+
+I am really reverently thankful for the idea that popped into my
+sorely troubled head at that moment. Roxanne had gone out to walk in
+the garden for a little rest, for she has had to talk to him most of
+the night and describe over and over what the burn on his arm looked
+like when the doctor dressed it. I was with him by myself for a few
+minutes when I found the treasure of an idea.
+
+"Lovelace Peyton," I said, with excitement in my voice more than the
+doctor would have approved of, "would you like me to get a real
+doctor's book and read you about each disease as it comes in the book
+and just what the doctors use to cure it with?"
+
+"Phyllie," he said, sitting up in bed and waving the poor bandaged
+hand with delight shining from under the bandage above his eyes, "you
+go a running and git that book as fast as you kin. I will promise to
+lie right still and listen all day and all night forever. Hurry!"
+
+I called Miss Priscilla to come quick as I saw her turning in the
+gate, and I took my hat and started down-town for the only bookstore
+in Byrdsville, which is kept in the post-office by the post-master. If
+I couldn't find a book about diseases there, I was determined to go
+and beg or borrow or steal one from the doctor himself. But I found
+the very one I wanted. It was called "First Aid in the Family," and it
+described more accidents and diseases than it seemed possible for
+mortal man to have. It was a large book and I was glad it cost five
+dollars. The post-master said a man had left it there for him to sell
+six months ago, and that it cost too much for most of the people in
+Byrdsville to doctor by. He offered to send it as soon as his boy came
+back, but I was in too much of a hurry to get back to Lovelace Peyton
+to wait, so I took it in my arms and started home with it.
+
+On the way I met Helena Kirby walking down-town with the Petway boy,
+and they looked right into my face and passed me without speaking. It
+might have been because I was carrying the big book, but I didn't know
+Helena was that proud. It hurts me for people to treat me that way
+without any reason but just dislike for me and perhaps because they
+think it wicked about Father's money.
+
+Just a little farther along I met Tony, and he took the book to carry
+for me, and I told him about Helena and the Petway boy looking at me
+and not offering to speak to me. Tony got red up to the roots of his
+hair, being mad, and looked like he would just as soon as not eat them
+both alive.
+
+"Now, see here, Phyllis," he spluttered, "don't you pay one bit of
+attention to what a pair of jolly idiots like those two do or say. You
+are all right and we all know it. No matter what happens, we're for
+you. See?"
+
+"Thank you, Tony," I said gratefully, but I didn't "see," and I was so
+puzzled over that "no matter what happens" that I felt weak in my
+brain.
+
+In a few minutes still worse happened. Belle and Mamie Sue saw us, and
+Belle forcibly crossed Mamie Sue over and went down the side street
+just to keep from meeting us--that was as plain as day. Tony got still
+redder and talked fast about Lovelace Peyton to keep from seeming to
+notice the way the girls had acted toward us. I held up my head and
+did likewise.
+
+Something awful has happened to me or about me in this town and I
+don't know what; but it is my duty to put it all out of my mind now
+and give my thoughts and cheerfulness to Roxanne and Lovelace Peyton,
+while they need me so much. I have made up my mind to forget it.
+
+And it was fun to read to the prostrated medicine-man out of that book
+as I did all afternoon. I began with abscesses and got almost as far
+as aneurism before the sun began to set. I never saw anybody enjoy
+anything as much as Lovelace Peyton did each disease as I read about
+it; and the more bloodcurdling the description of the suffering and
+more awful the treatment, the more it interested him.
+
+"I bet if I ever get a good sharp knife, I could stick it right in the
+pain place in Uncle Pompey's heel so it would bleed all the sore
+away," he said with keen enjoyment, as I read to him about the lancing
+of carbuncles.
+
+"Oh, Lovey, I almost get the diseases while Phyllis reads about them,"
+said Roxanne with a shudder. "Do you like to hear about such awful
+things?"
+
+"Yes, I do," answered Lovelace Peyton decidedly. "And I wisht you
+would get every one of the diseases in that book, Rosy, so I could
+cure you like Phyllis reads--and Uncle Pompey and Doug, too. Only not
+Phyllis, 'cause I need her to read the cure to me, while I do it."
+
+While we were all laughing at Lovelace Peyton and talking about the
+operations he is going to perform on the inhabitants of Byrdsville as
+soon as he gets grown, and deciding what each one is going to have,
+the Idol came in and stayed with us until the soft gray twilight began
+to come in the windows. He was so lovely and interesting that it was
+quite dark when I remembered that I must go home. Then he walked over
+through the garden with me, and out there under the stars he told me
+what the doctor had told him in the afternoon. Old Dr. Hughes is
+afraid to experiment with Lovelace Peyton's eyes, and says that a
+specialist must come from Cincinnati to examine them when they take
+off the bandages next week. Mr. Douglass has written to the doctor to
+see what it will cost, and he doesn't want Roxanne to know about it
+until he hears whether the doctor will come and give him time to pay
+for it.
+
+"Oh, I don't believe the bug-hunter is going to have any trouble with
+seeing all right again and we'll get the big doctor down here to see
+him some way or other. Don't you worry, Miss Phyllis; I just told you
+because you are the best friend of all concerned, and I couldn't do
+anything without consulting you. See?" he asked, in the same
+protecting tone of voice that Tony had used in the afternoon when
+Belle and Mamie Sue did me that way.
+
+After I was undressed I felt that I just must go into my mother's room
+for a minute; and I begged so hard that the night nurse who is a very
+kind lady, let me creep in for just a few seconds. I have got a theory
+about Mother and myself. I believe she knows when I am in the room,
+even if she can't show it by moving or even opening her eyes, and it
+is a comfort to her and me both to have me come and kneel at the foot
+of her bed well out of sight. I did get comforted to-night, too, and
+the thought that did it was this. If Father and I don't do as well as
+other people in the world, and get rich and do things that we ought
+not to, we have not had her to direct and control and comfort us like
+she would have done if she could; and no wonder we have strayed. A
+motherless girl and a wifeless man ought not to be judged in the same
+way other people are. I feel better now, and I'm leaving it all to
+God, who understands such situations as mine and Father's. Good-night,
+leather friend.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Somewhere back on your pages, Louise, I wrote that I was going to be
+thankful for the happiness and friends that I had, no matter what
+happened, and I am. It has happened. I am the lonely little child that
+got a peep through the high, barred gate into the garden where other
+children were playing in the sunshine, and then was put out into the
+dark street again. I ought not to say that, though, when I have got
+Mr. Douglass Byrd for a star in my darkness, as he has made himself by
+the way he has treated me.
+
+I am glad I stopped by on my way to school this morning to see Roxanne
+and Lovelace Peyton while I was their light-hearted companion still:
+now I am a woman of sorrows and disgrace. Also, I am glad, if the blow
+had to be dealt me, it was Belle who did it, and not Mamie Sue nor one
+of the two Willises, nor anybody else. I have always had a strange
+feeling about that bracelet with the red set, anyway, and I am not
+surprised that she struck me with it.
+
+"Miss Forsythe," she said, as she held it out to me all wrapped up in
+tissue paper and tied with a blood red string, "I will have to return
+your present to you, with thanks. I cannot keep a bracelet given me by
+a girl whose father would go like a chicken thief and rob a neighbor's
+shed of a valuable thing like an invention. Please excuse me!"
+
+For a minute I stood struck dumb, and watched Belle's pink gingham
+skirt switch as she walked through the door of the school-room. They
+had all the lunch spread on the flat rock, and I thought were waiting
+for me while I put my desk in order just after the bell rang. And even
+while I watched Belle I was conscious of Mamie Sue's fat expression of
+distress as she paused with a biscuit spread with jam half-way to her
+mouth. The Willis girls looked struck even dumber than usual, and as
+if they didn't know what to do. I didn't give them a chance to decide
+on anything. I picked up my hat from the ground and walked out the
+gate with my head as high, as if my honor had not been laid low.
+
+I was walking just as fast as I could past the cottage, hoping that
+nobody would see me before I got here to my room to realize my agony
+myself, when Roxanne ran out of the door to catch me at the gate.
+
+"Oh, Phyllis, don't look like that," she exclaimed as she drew me
+through the gate and behind the big lilac bush that is full of purple
+blooms. "It doesn't make one bit of difference to me, and I love you
+just the same. Who told you?"
+
+"Belle," I answered, trying to keep my face and voice steady. "Who
+found it out, Roxanne?"
+
+"Oh, Tony scouted it all out, though he didn't mean to. It was that
+awful smelly bottle Lovey gave your father. Tony smelled it talking to
+Mr. Forsythe at the gate and then again in the shed. He couldn't
+connect them at first; but after a while he remembered, and then he
+began to suspect something awful--he oughtn't to have done it, but he
+did. He followed your father and Mr. Rogers out to the furnaces one
+night and--saw Mr. Rogers explain it to your father. Then Mr. Forsythe
+went away the next morning and Douglass began to watch Mr. Rogers, and
+just three days after that he found him out at the furnace at night
+with a workman getting some of the ovens ready to try the experiments.
+He couldn't do a thing, and had to let them take his discovery and do
+as they wanted to. Oh, truly Phyllis, it doesn't make a bit of
+difference in our love for you."
+
+"How did Belle find it out, and why should they think Father is
+dishonest--even if Rogers is?" I asked, still as cold as ice though my
+head seemed to be on fire.
+
+"That is what is nearly killing Tony," answered Roxanne, with a sob
+beginning to come in her voice; but she still held on to me tight, as
+stiff as I was. "He and Douglass have known it for a week, and they
+never wanted anybody else to know about it on your account. Douglass
+says he would rather give up ten fortunes than hurt such a friend as
+you have been to us, but Tony let the secret get out by accident, and
+now all the town knows it. Judge Luttrell is getting out an
+injunction, even if Douglass won't sign it, and the Colonel is getting
+ready to go on the next train to find your father and--and remonstrate
+with him, he says."
+
+"Tony didn't tell Belle about it on purpose, did he?" I asked to be
+sure. "I couldn't have stood that."
+
+"Oh, no, it was Mamie Sue that found out part, and told Belle, without
+knowing she had done it, just yesterday. Mamie Sue says she wishes she
+never had any eyes or ears or anything to taste with, then maybe she
+would never get into trouble. It is all on account of people thinking
+she is more stupid than she is. Tony told Douglass right before her,
+on the street while she was giving both of them some of that fudge she
+had made to bring Lovelace Peyton, that Mr. Rogers had been in the
+telegraph office and had telegraphed your father that the experiment
+night before last was a success. Tony is ambitious as a Scout should
+always be and has learned to read the ticking of the telegraph.
+
+"'Anyway, Doug, it's a cinch that you have made one of the greatest
+practical inventions of the day,' Tony said, forgetting Mamie Sue
+entirely and so did Douglass, as he answered:
+
+"'That's true, Raccoon, and if the fortune is another man's by
+robbery, the brains are mine. I'll get my share yet. Wait until this
+new idea gets into shape.'"
+
+And then Roxanne went on to say that Mamie Sue said they hardly
+remembered her enough to politely thank her for the fudge, as they
+walked away talking. She went on down to Belle's; and when Belle began
+to say that Tony was stupid because he couldn't read his Cicero,
+Friday, she tried to defend him by telling how he can read telegraphy
+even if he can't read Latin.
+
+Belle was mean enough to get it all from Mamie Sue without Mamie Sue
+suspecting that she was telling anything that would hurt me; and Belle
+told Helena and Helena told the ladylike Petway, who told his father,
+who told Judge Luttrell before night. The Judge sent for the Idol
+before breakfast this morning and told him that he was an idiot to let
+such a thing be stolen and he is beginning all kinds of prosecutions
+and things against Father, though my noble hearted friend won't sign
+them on account of his esteem for me. And, of course, the whole town
+knows of it and is excited. It is not astonishing that Byrdsville is
+wild to find out that it has reared a great inventor, only to have his
+first fruits stolen. I feel with Byrdsville, even if they feel against
+me. Some of this Roxanne told me and some of it is my own surmise that
+came to me as we stood behind that old lilac bush.
+
+"I don't believe it, but if it is true, you won't let your father's
+having done my brother that way make any difference in the way you
+love us, Lovey and Douglass and me, will you, Phyllis? We just need
+you that much more to help us through with the starving and freezing
+for the new invention that we are going to take better care of."
+Through all my misery I ask myself if any girl in the whole wide world
+ever had a friend like Roxanne Byrd?
+
+And as if having Roxanne hold me in both arms and love me beyond my
+wildest expectations was not enough, what should happen to me? The
+Idol came around the bush full of blooms where we stood, and did
+likewise. He put his long arms around Roxanne and me and hugged us
+both up like we were not any bigger than Lovelace Peyton.
+
+"You two precious kiddies are not to pay any attention to disagreeable
+things that are not any of your business," he said in his wonderful
+voice that was as big and booming and comforting as any anthem sung in
+church where a sinner goes for help. That's what it sounded like to
+me.
+
+"That's what I tell Phyllis, Douglass--she's more valuable than the
+loss of any kind of a big fortune, that we really don't need at all to
+make us happy, while we do need her." Roxanne was laughing and crying
+and hugging me so that she got herself mixed in her words in a
+perfectly beautiful and loving way.
+
+I am glad that my affection for these kind friends inspired me so that
+I could answer them like I wanted to--at least I tried so hard to say
+how I felt that I almost succeeded.
+
+"You are both the best friends that were ever created for a lonely
+girl," I answered, drawing out of both pairs of arms, and looking them
+both square in the face. "But I am my father's daughter and must
+suffer for his sins, if he has them. If he has done this dreadful
+thing, which I don't believe, then I don't deserve your friendliness,
+and I can't take what it is not right for me to have. I'm going home
+and stay there until he comes, and then if he can't explain and has to
+pay any penalty I'm going to do it with him."
+
+"Oh, Phyllis, and what will Lovey do without you?" Roxanne begged,
+using the strongest thing she could have said to me when I thought of
+the little blind boy that wanted and needed me so badly.
+
+"You will punish him and us for something we can't help," the Idol
+said to me with reproach in his eyes and voice that nearly killed me.
+
+"You both have had your kind of pride about taking gifts from me ever
+since I have known you," I answered, looking them full in the eyes,
+"and you have taught me what the word means. I could take things to
+eat and wear from you, but my kind of pride won't let me take your
+friendship when you think my father has treated you like this.
+Good-by! I can't stay any longer to be tortured." And with that I
+turned and walked away from them both, forever, I am afraid.
+
+It isn't true, it can't be! But if it is? One thing I have made up my
+mind to do: I am going to ask Father, if it is all true, to let me go
+away from Byrdsville. I can't stay here; it will be too empty a life
+for me to watch them living with me out of it. I hope he will go and
+take Mother too. Judge Luttrell may prosecute him so he will have to.
+
+Is this the end of the life that bloomed out in me like the apple
+blossoms do on the bare trees, only to be shattered? No! I hope I will
+bear fruit from having had so much happiness, like the apple-trees do
+from their blooms, and I'm going to try.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Just here I laid down Louise and went to see what I could see going on
+down at the cottage before dark. And there was old Uncle Pompey
+hanging over our garden wall smoking his pipe and just crying into his
+funny red bandanna handkerchief. Something tells me that he is going
+to miss me very much also. I am thankful for the love of this old
+negro, which I am sure is just the same quality as if he were white.
+
+I think if I could just steal in for one minute and look at Lovelace
+Peyton's little bandaged head it would make the pain in my heart
+easier for having to give him up, but even that I can't do. I've found
+how strong pride is as well as bitter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Of course, I know that there are many strange things in life that seem
+to contradict each other and themselves in a very puzzling manner, but
+my disgrace has turned out in a way that nobody could have made me
+believe, if they had told it to me in dictionary words of six
+syllables. I am being befriended and honored by the whole of
+Byrdsville, and I don't know what to make of it. My mind refuses to
+explain it and my heart is just going on rejoicing over it, as I have
+not been able to think up any reason why it shouldn't.
+
+Everybody now knows about the steel process that their distinguished
+citizen, Mr. Douglass Byrd, invented; and they all believe that Father
+has had it stolen and has left Byrdsville for some place where Colonel
+Stockell can't find him, but they are none of them mad at me about it.
+Of course, a load of sympathy can be as heavy to bear as one of
+disgrace; and when you have both the two to stagger under, you may
+wobble some in your conduct, as I have done these last two days.
+First, though my reason is convinced about Father, there is something
+in me that just won't believe it, and that keeps making me hope, and
+be passive in life, until he comes. I say nothing about it to anybody,
+because the proof is too great against him, and I suppose it is really
+more daughterly love than hope. Anyway, it is a precious feeling to
+me.
+
+But one thing that troubles me is the way one friend's sorrow can
+throw its shadow over the lives of many others. It troubles me that
+Tony and Roxanne and the Colonel and some of the others are distressed
+about me, especially Tony. He came to see me the morning after Belle
+had told me all about his scouting out the secret; and if it hadn't
+been such an occasion I would have had to laugh at the collapsed way
+he looked, like he would fall to pieces if you touched him even very
+gently. His grin was so entirely gone that his mouth looked only the
+size of an ordinary human being's, and his eyes were shut down so
+dolefully that they were funnier than ever.
+
+"Go on, Bubble, and shake me," he said, with a comical sadness that
+was hard to bear with proper respect. "Play I'm a doormat if you want
+to, but I cross my heart and body I didn't mean to hurt you by letting
+my mouth overwork at the wrong time. The Dumpling is just a sponge
+that sops up any old thing and lets any old body squeeze it out of
+her. Please say you forgive me."
+
+"Why, Tony," I said with difficult but becoming gravity, "don't you
+know that I know that you didn't mean to do anything to hurt me?" I
+couldn't bring myself to mention Father or the shameful circumstances
+and I hoped he wouldn't, either.
+
+Tony is not a mere boy; he is a kind gentleman, also, and he ignored
+the subject we were discussing just as carefully as I did.
+
+"Good for you, girliky, and I hope you fully realize that this little
+old burg of Byrdsville is all for you and anxious to hop rig-lit into
+your pocket," he said most picturesquely, with relief at my not being
+hurt at him beginning to pull the corners of his mouth into the grin
+that he had put away as not suitable for the occasion.
+
+A person who has the smile habit fixed on his face is a very valuable
+friend, and I was glad to see Tony put on his grin again. There were
+two or three questions I wanted to ask him when he was in his normal
+condition, and I was just going to consult him about whether it
+wouldn't be easier for the other girls and boys for me not to go to
+school--anyway until they found Father and his innocence, or knew the
+worst about the prosecution and other punishments that would be given
+him; but before I could get the words arranged in my mind to say just
+what I wanted to say, he began on something like the same subject
+himself.
+
+"See here, Phyllis, Roxy told me that you hadn't been in to jolly the
+bug-grubber to-day at all, and the poor little bubble is worried about
+what she thinks is going to be a grouch in your system," he said,
+looking at me with so much confidence in my good disposition shining
+in his face, that it was painful to try to make him understand just
+how the pride disease I had caught from the Byrds was affecting me.
+
+"Indeed you know, Tony, that it is not because I don't love Roxanne
+and Lovelace Peyton that I haven't been there this morning; but I just
+don't think it is right for me to be taking their friendship and love
+when everybody thinks my own father has injured them, as he has not.
+It is right for me to suffer for what they think he has done, until we
+know better, and my pride won't let me take any more of their
+affection when I may not deserve it." I looked away while I was
+talking to Tony, for I hated to see the shock fade the grin. I also
+hated to bring up the subject we were ignoring.
+
+"Oh, fudge and fiddlesticks, Phyllis, don't let any old sour idea like
+that ball up your naturally sweet temper. You and Roxy are just women
+folks and had better keep out of men's business, like this wrangle
+between Doug and Mr. Forsythe. Trot along and do your stocking-darning
+and pie-fixing together as per usual schedule. And as to this
+mix-up--forget it!"
+
+"I know, Tony, that Roxanne and I are just children--and what is
+worse, just girls--but I have to do what I think is honorable under
+these circumstances; and taking friendliness from Roxanne now would be
+just charity--I can't do it." As I spoke I felt my head straighten
+itself after the manner of the grandmother portrait, just as if I had
+been born a Byrd.
+
+"Now, who would have thought that you could 'throw a crank' like that,
+Phyllis--a girl who could brace another girl as hefty as Roxy upon her
+shoulder to save the whole town and Dr. Snakes from being dynamited?
+I'm disappointed in you."
+
+"Why, how did you know about that explosion that Lovelace Peyton
+almost blew us all into pieces with?" I asked with astonishment.
+
+"Roxy sniffled it all to me this morning when she was pouring out her
+trouble because you hadn't been over to cheer up the bugger to-day.
+She told Pink and Sam and Belle and the Sponge and me all about it,
+and I can tell you we thrilled some. By acclamation we have elected
+you to lead the Kitten Patrol of the Campfire that we Scouts have been
+talking about helping you bubbles set up for a month. We have already
+decided to put you in command of the girls, because we can then expect
+some real good stand-bying in case of Scout trouble or excitement. We
+meet in the Crotch to-night to decide all the details." Tony's eyes
+were shining and flaring and his red hair standing straight up in his
+friendly excitement.
+
+Honors are mighty apt to shock a person when they come unexpectedly,
+and I don't believe expected ones bring half the joy that the surprise
+ones do. I feel humble to think that in less than a year the boys and
+girls of a place like Byrdsville have found me worthy of the
+leadership of such a sacred thing as a Girl Scout company will be.
+For, of course, of all the things that boys ever were in the world,
+nothing is so wonderful as being Scouts like so many hundreds and
+hundreds have been made all over the United States in the last three
+years. And when the Boy Scouts do all the noble things in the noble
+way they do, what will be expected of the girls, now that they are
+being let Into the organization? The boys have to pledge themselves to
+be clean and honorable and kind and just and charitable and brave; so,
+of course, the girls will have to be all that and still more. Could I?
+
+I sat still and thought for a long time, and Tony, with his knowledge
+of girls, let me do it. Could I? Could a girl with a father that might
+have done the thing that my father is suspected of having done to a
+fellow-man, promise to be all or any of those things? How would she
+know that some little thing in her, like her father, wouldn't come up,
+just at the time when she was being depended on, to make her fail?
+This distinction was not for me!
+
+"Tony," I said quietly, and I didn't let the tremble in my heart get
+into my voice at all, "whatever happens to me in my life I can't ever
+forget that you offered to make me the leader of the Campfire, but--I
+can't be it. Please don't make me say any more about it. I can't."
+
+Tony understood. "Not a word more on the subject, Bubble; but I do
+want to say that you are one fine--"
+
+But just here we were interrupted by Mamie Sue coming lumbering across
+the wall from the Byrd cottage, for Tony and I had been sitting on a
+bench out under the blooming peach-tree arbor. She sat pretty close to
+me and gave me a nice, good, fat-armed hug as she offered me a paper
+bag.
+
+"Have some fudge, Phyllis," was all she said; but I saw Belle walking
+down the street with her head in the air and her skirts switching like
+Helena's and I knew that Mamie Sue had come through a hard fight to be
+friends with me. I can't say how I appreciated it, and I love Mamie
+Sue. Maybe she is not very smart, but a person that always has
+sweetness of disposition and in paper bags to offer a friend in
+trouble ought to be appreciated. And just as I had got hold of her
+nice big right arm to return the hug, around the other side of the
+house came Pink and Sam, with Miss Priscilla in between them.
+
+"Phyllis dear," said Miss Prissy, as all of us got up to give her a
+seat, though she only took Tony's and part of mine, while the boys sat
+on the grass, "the boys are telling me about the Girl Scout ideas. I
+think it is naughty of them to say they are going to name you the
+Kitten Patrol, especially as your rescue of Lovey Byrd is more than
+likely to give you a life-saving medal to start with, as soon as the
+Colonel writes to New York about it."
+
+"A medal--a--a medal like Tony's?" I gasped, as my heart stood still
+in awe of my own act.
+
+"Why, of course, Bubble, you will get a medal," said Tony, with the
+delight that some boys might not have shown at the idea of a girl's
+getting up to the same height of distinction that they had attained.
+"Now, will you be good and be the leader of the Kittens?"
+
+"Say, Phyllis, when you raised Roxy from the ground, did you use the
+other muscles of your body or depend a lot on the shoulder lift?" Sam
+is not so big and strong as the other boys and consequently has the
+greatest regard for the strength that he hasn't got.
+
+I could only say that I didn't know what I had lifted Roxanne up to
+catch the bottle with--except prayers.
+
+And while they all sat there in my garden and talked with Miss
+Priscilla about what she should get the Colonel to write to
+headquarters about me and about the dynamite and the steel and
+everything that was indirectly related to my disgrace, I sat quiet and
+prayed for some sort of strength to tell them that I maybe couldn't be
+a Scout, and couldn't have a medal and was hoping to move away from
+them to some other place to live, just as I had learned to like them
+better than I had dreamed one could like friends.
+
+These boys and girls, including Miss Priscilla, haven't been used to
+having things happen to them to distress them, and they are so
+warm-hearted and sympathetic that it makes it hard to say a thing to
+them that would hurt them. But I couldn't, couldn't go on being a
+public and distinguished character, if my father were going to be a
+public character of another kind. If people should say, "How his life
+must mortify his poor daughter, noble girl, with a medal and friends
+and things!" that would just put me on the other side of the fence
+from my own parent, who needs me more than ever, if he is sinful. He
+isn't, but what right have I to bask in public favor while he is in
+outer darkness?
+
+Then just as I was going to decline to be a member of the Campfire and
+beg them all not to mention it to me any more, and try not to worry
+over me but to just forget about me, something so horrible came over
+the wall, in the shape of the news that Mr. Douglass Byrd brought,
+that I and they forgot all about the Scouts and Kittens and medals and
+all that. The Idol was pale and quiet as he walked up the path to us,
+after skimming over the wall with one hand on it in a way that made
+Sam gasp with admiration. He looked past Miss Priscilla and the rest
+of his old friends of inherited generations in Byrdsville and straight
+at me, his new--but adoring--one.
+
+"Miss Phyllis," he said, with such sadness in his voice that Mamie Sue
+gulped over a piece of fudge worse than usual, "Dr. Hughes has just
+examined Lovey's eyes and it has hurt him very much--also he thinks
+the sight has gone. The youngster is crying and fretting for you and
+they don't want him to do that under any circumstances. The only hope
+for his sight will be for him not to inflame his eyes. Will you come?"
+
+Would I go--would I go across the dead body of my father's honor and
+my own and anybody's disgraces and any other old thing? I went so
+quickly that I upset Mamie Sue on the one side and Miss Priscilla
+almost on the other, and I didn't even wait to answer the Idol in the
+reverent and respectful manner that is always his due and that I
+always observe. Down that garden path I flew and over that wall I
+skimmed, like a bird with wings, or like the Idol himself, and in so
+little a time that I didn't even realize the journey, I was in
+Roxanne's room with her in one of my arms and Lovelace Peyton squeezed
+up in the other.
+
+Roxanne choked her sobs down in my neck and I choked mine down in my
+heart as the little doctor kicked one fat little knee out from under
+the cover and began to squeal like a queer kind of pig as one of his
+arms went around and around.
+
+"That's the way I cried when that old Dr. Hughes hurt my eyes to make
+'em well, Phyllie, and you wasn't here to see him do it and tell me
+how red they looked and if they had got any blue around the edges like
+a carbuncle. Roxy can't tell disease like you kin, and now you was
+away from 'em and didn't see the nice ones I have got in both eyes."
+
+The reproach in his voice was so funny and yet so sad that Roxanne and
+I both choked still more and held on to each other tight. I just
+simply couldn't say a word, and I was again made ashamed by that
+unruly lump in my throat that never seems to come unless something is
+the matter with the Byrds.
+
+"I'm hungry, too, for some of the nice sweet charlock rookster that
+your cook makes me and I eats in the afternoon, right now. I waked up
+in the night and wanted it and you, too, Phyllie, and I wouldn't have
+old Doug or Roxy, neither. Now, it is always night time and Roxy
+wouldn't go and call you. Won't you stay with me always and read me
+about smallpox like you promised?
+
+"Always night now!" Again Roxanne and I hugged and choked, but this
+time I had to conquer the lump and answer him.
+
+"Indeed, indeed, Lovelace Peyton, I'm never going to leave you any
+more, only to go and get the things you want. Can't I go and get the
+charlotte russe for you now?"
+
+"No, Phyllie," he exclaimed, grasping with his strong little fingers
+my hand that lay on his pillow. "I wants smallpox now worser than I do
+charlocks. Then Tony can come and let me tie bandages around his leg
+while you go git the rookster and maybe some nice cake and oranges and
+candy. No; Dumpie bringed me candy. You git more rags to tie up folks
+with. I want to fix Doug's head good 'fore he goes to bed. But read
+the smallpoxes right away. Begin where they throws up."
+
+Roxanne got the book while I drew a chair by the bed and sat down to
+it, with gratitude drying the tears in my heart, for being forced into
+forgetting my pride and coming back to them again. Roxanne sat by me
+and held my left hand until we got to the worst part of the smallpox,
+and then she got pale around the mouth and went out of the room.
+
+"Read the sickest part again, Phyllie, and then turn and read the
+medicine for it," he had just demanded when she fled.
+
+And for the rest of the afternoon I sat by him and went through all
+the different stages of smallpox until, feeling each one acutely as I
+did, it is a wonder I was not pock-marked. When he fell asleep at last
+he was holding fast to one of my hands for fear I would get away with
+the precious book.
+
+When I could slip his fingers from mine, I tried to steal tiptoe
+through the hall so as not to wake Roxanne, who was lying asleep, I
+hoped, on the sofa in the hall, but she opened her great, troubled,
+dark eyes and saw me before I got to the door.
+
+"Oh, Phyllis," she said and held out her arms to me. Somehow it seems
+to me I have learned very quickly how to take a person I love in my
+arms without awkwardness--that is for a girl who never had anybody to
+take before--and I sat down and snuggled Roxanne in a manner
+comfortable to us both. "Do you think it is possible that Lovey is
+going to be--be blind?" she asked me in a small voice that could
+hardly dare utter the horrible words.
+
+"I came in such a hurry when Mr. Douglass Byrd called me that I didn't
+quite understand what Dr. Hughes said or found," I answered.
+
+"When he took the bandages off, Lovey didn't seem to see at all, but
+the lids are still so swollen that he is not sure they are closed. I
+don't believe he knows what to do, Phyllis, and that is what scares
+me. But is there any great thing a blind man can do except be a
+musician? Lovey can't sing much."
+
+I verily believe that Roxanne Byrd would have gone on and planned some
+kind of a career of blind genius for Lovelace Peyton while waiting to
+see if he was to lose his eyes, if the Idol hadn't come into the hall
+at that moment.
+
+He moved Roxanne over and sat down between us and began to talk
+seriously to us, like I was a valued member of the Byrd family.
+
+"I have just had a long talk with Dr. Hughes, and he says that
+Lovelace Peyton will have to have a specialist examine his eyes and
+direct the treatment, if the sight is to be saved. We will have to
+think up a plan to get a great doctor from Cincinnati down to
+Byrdsville, Tennessee."
+
+"But it will cost so much and where--?" Roxanne stopped quickly for
+fear of hurting the Idol's feelings and not from my presence. One of
+the great things about the Byrds is that they can forget riches in
+such a way as not even to know or realize that they haven't them.
+
+"We'll get it," answered the Idol with his heroic look, the like of
+which I do not believe a man ever owned before. "Things are going to
+go straight, now that Miss Phyllis has got the bugger all happy with
+the medical course again. What would all of us do without her?" He
+stood up to light his pipe and his fingers trembled.
+
+Anybody else but a great man, born of a great family like the Byrds,
+would have hurt my feelings by saying apologetic things about the
+tragedy between us, but the Idol just ignored it and I was made one of
+them again in their trouble. Suddenly something popped into my mind
+that I could do to get the money for them to save Lovelace Peyton's
+eyes and not hurt the family pride. There is no doubt about it, when a
+girl gets so she can ask God to help her and think at the same time,
+she can find an inspiration when she needs it. I may be in trouble and
+disgraced, but I've got Him on my side, and I can yet do things when
+my friends have such dire needs as a doctor. I am afraid to write it
+even to you, leather Louise.
+
+Suddenly I stood up beside Mr. Douglass, and looked down at Roxanne,
+and then up at him.
+
+"Do both of you trust me enough to let me try to help if I do it with
+my own brains and not--not my father's money?" I asked.
+
+For a moment they both looked at me, and then the Idol took my hand in
+his and looked me in the eyes just as square as I looked at him.
+
+"Yes," he said in a voice that grows more wonderful the more you love
+and know him, "you are one of us and you can plan with us all you are
+able to."
+
+"Yes, Phyllis; you have never offered or asked us to do anything we
+ought not to, and if you can think with us I know it will help,"
+Roxanne said, looking up at me trustfully.
+
+Again I make record, Louise, that my course with the Byrd family pride
+has conquered it, even if I did display symptoms of it myself by
+staying away from the cottage so long. I'm in a very queer position. I
+have not made everybody understand that I can't be a Girl Scout and I
+am a dishonored person in Byrdsville, with all sorts of distinctions
+offered me. But this scheme I have thought up to get the doctor here
+has made me hold my breath so that I can hardly write, and I can't
+worry over honors and medals and things. I will do it! I will!
+Good-night!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Some people are so afflicted with energy that their days are
+twenty-five and a half hours long. Mine are twenty-six just now. If it
+were not for the fact that several hours each day I am under the
+influence of Roxanne's repose, I suspect I would run down like a clock
+that has exhausted its mainspring. Mamie Sue says that Belle says
+Roxanne is shiftless, but Belle is unable to distinguish shiftlessness
+from noble composure under difficulties. I told Mamie Sue that it
+would be best for her to forget all that Belle has ever said to her;
+and she is trying.
+
+Still, though I understand it perfectly, it is positively queer to
+hear Roxanne talk about what the great doctor is going to do for
+Lovelace Peyton's eyes, and they haven't done one thing about getting
+him here from Cincinnati. The Idol has gone back to the obscurity of
+the shed, and I suppose he is making up some plan about the doctor,
+while he is working with his furnaces and retorts and things, but he
+hasn't told one yet, and it is two whole days. I do hope and pray that
+my plan will succeed without his having to bother with a common thing
+like money.
+
+I have had to go to school these two days and then I have to study
+medicine with Lovelace Peyton almost all of every afternoon, so I
+haven't much time; but I think by to-morrow night I will have told
+about a thousand dollars' worth of things about my father and I can
+send it all off to Cousin Gilmore Lewis. The time the butler in our
+North Shore cottage, summer before last, told the newspapers so many
+things about the way Father and his family lived, he got three hundred
+dollars for it; so it does seem that if his own daughter told almost a
+whole small book about Father it would be worth at least a thousand
+dollars to a big magazine that prints things about everything in the
+world.
+
+I heard Cousin Gilmore tell Father last spring that it wouldn't be
+long before he got to him in his magazine, and I have two reasons for
+wanting to beat the one who is going to write Father up. One is that I
+need the money for Lovelace Peyton's eyes, and the other is that
+before all this comes out about Father and the stolen steel patent, I
+want to write about him like he might be, and ignore what the world
+may consider him. I want to tell about him like I feel toward him and
+not like I know people will think he is. If the weekly comes out every
+week, they ought to print what I say about a week from Saturday, and
+maybe it will take Judge Luttrell that long to get his prosecution
+ready. The Judge doesn't work much harder than others in Byrdsville,
+and I can trust him to be slow. Of course, I couldn't write a thousand
+dollars' worth of things about just Father himself, but I am telling
+all about Byrdsville, which is his present home, and how distinguished
+and beloved he is in it.
+
+A lot I have written I have just copied down from you, Louise--who are
+a better friend than I knew when I bought you--such as the
+descriptions of the apple-trees and landscape and Father's charity to
+Mr. and Mrs. Satterwhite. It filled up two pages just to mention the
+things he gave them, and it was a page more when I told a few of the
+grateful things they said to me. I left myself out and had them say
+the things right to him. What his generosity in the matter of buying
+jewelry from Mr. Snider did for the seven children--with just three of
+the names mentioned, because I think Sally Geraldine, Judy Claudia,
+and Tom Roderick are interesting as names--made more than a page more.
+
+I wrote until nearly twelve o'clock last night about the Byrds and
+their family history and how wonderful it is for Father to have made
+such friends as they are. I just described the Idol as he really is
+and told what a great inventor he is without dwelling on what he
+invented, because that will be published when Judge Luttrell gets out
+the injunction.
+
+I mentioned Lovelace Peyton's accident in detail, because some day
+when he is a world-famous surgeon a good account of it will be
+valuable. That took up fourteen pages. I am going to send that kodak
+picture Tony took of Roxanne, with a good description of her to be
+printed under it.
+
+Nobody could really give a good history of the Byrd cottage without at
+least a half dozen pages of Uncle Pompey and what he cooks. I am going
+to get the nutcake recipe and paste it on the margin. All women
+readers will like that if they try it once.
+
+And just as I was so tired that I was about to fall into the ink-well
+it occurred to me to describe faithfully the great-grandmother Byrd
+portrait, especially about her being such a friend of George
+Washington's wife and about the English earl who fell in love with
+her, but grandfather Byrd was the victor to carry off the prize. It
+gave Father credit just to have bought the house they lived in.
+
+I got up early this morning and wrote about what good friends he has
+made of Judge Luttrell and Mr. Chadwell, and some of the other
+gentlemen. I told what a great lawyer the Judge is and I here
+mentioned Tony's Scout medal, too, for if a Scout medal is not
+distinguished, I don't know what is.
+
+And writing about Tony's medal reminded me that I would have to write
+something about myself, or seem to be prudish. I left that until
+to-night, and I have just finished it. I had to get in two pages about
+Miss Priscilla and the Colonel before I began on myself. I defended
+her for not marrying him unless she wants to, and I moralized five
+sentences on a woman's right not to marry.
+
+Then I thought that when it is published all over the United States,
+Mamie Sue might accidentally see a copy and be hurt that she was not
+in it, so I put her recipe for fudge in with her name signed to it. I
+grouped Pink and Sam and the two Willises and some others as prominent
+citizens who were all Father's friends, with just slight mention of
+their being his guest on the hay-ride. I left Belle and Helena and the
+Petway silk-tie-boy out. I thought it was kindness.
+
+Then when I got to myself I hadn't a word to say because I had used
+all the words in the dictionary several times over about the others,
+so I just wrote this that I copy down in order to see again how it
+looks: "Mr. Forsythe has one child, Phyllis. She is a tall, strong
+girl with tan hair, and she shares his friendship for Byrdsville
+enthusiastically." Now, if that isn't the truth, I don't know what is,
+and what more could I say about myself? That is a very dignified and
+correct account of me.
+
+I have only to write the note to Cousin Gilmore to tell him that a
+thousand dollars is the price and not to let it come out later than
+next Saturday, and tie it up in a box for the express. As I say, I
+think just lately I have worked more than twenty-four hours a day.
+Good-night!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+I am glad that article for the weekly was finished yesterday, and
+expressed, for if I hadn't finished it, I might have had to wait some
+time. I must study hard now, for examinations begin next week, and I
+am so far behind that it is difficult for me to even understand what
+they are talking about in class, and I have been able to recite purely
+by accident. It is one of the strange and unaccountable things that
+happen in a person's life that hard study or the lack of it has no
+real influence on the way a girl or boy recites. If I am well prepared
+on a lesson, the teacher always asks me something that had slipped my
+most diligent hunt, and if I don't know a thing about the lesson she
+asks me a question about something I do know about. Such is school
+life!
+
+And it is a fortunate thing for me that next week is examination, for
+everybody is too worried and busy to notice me and my affairs, and
+they don't talk Scouts or parties or anything that I might be
+embarrassed about on account of my position. Quadratics are
+embarrassing to everybody. I have to study. Good-night.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+I did the Idol a dreadful injustice when I felt that he had gone to
+work on another of his inventions and had not made a plan for Lovelace
+Peyton's eyes. I didn't write down that I had felt hard toward him,
+for that would have seemed disloyal, but I did. He wrote right up to
+the doctor in Cincinnati and asked him to come on the next train and
+the heartless man telegraphed that it would cost a thousand dollars
+for him to come and it would have to be guaranteed. No wonder the Idol
+was white and still for a whole day. Now he has thought up a plan and
+it is a sacrifice, but he and Roxanne are going to do it, if I can't
+get the thousand by telegram, as I asked Cousin Gilmore to send it by
+Monday morning--which they don't know about yet. I hate to write the
+sacrifice down--it seems a desecration! They are going to sell one of
+the foundation stones of the Byrd family pride for this vulgar money
+they need for the doctor from Cincinnati. I can't bear to think about
+it, though I have never seen the ancestral stone, and it is only a few
+musty papers, kept in the vault at the Byrdsville County Bank. They
+are letters from George Washington and other generals to one of the
+Byrd ancestors, written during the Revolution about some of the great
+stratagems they wanted him to execute for them with his regiment,
+which was a very fine one. They hope that they're worth much more than
+any thousand dollars, and they are to be the price of Lovelace
+Peyton's eyes. The Idol has written about them and he hopes to get the
+money immediately by telegraph, and send for the doctor the first of
+next week. That is, if God doesn't let me get my telegram before
+theirs. He is going to, my faith makes me believe.
+
+And Oh! I do want my composition to be printed so the world may know
+what a good man my father could be, if he would just give up his
+thirst for money. It may keep other young men from following in his
+footsteps, instead of doing like Judge Luttrell and other Byrdsville
+men.
+
+"Of course, Phyllis, it is an awful thing to give up a part of your
+inheritance like those papers are, but then Lovey's eyes are still
+more valuable to the Byrd family," Roxanne said, as we were discussing
+the sacrifice. "He is going to be such a great doctor that he will
+make history himself and, of course, we will have copies of the
+originals; and when people are writing Douglass's and Lovey's
+biographies they can go and see the originals. And after the
+eye-doctor is paid, we will have a lot left over for this new thing
+Douglass is inventing. He just told me about it last night, and I can
+tell you now."
+
+"Don't tell me, Roxanne, don't!" I interrupted her quickly. The blood
+dyed my face so red that I felt as if I could wipe it off with my
+handkerchief, if I tried.
+
+And Roxanne, instead of blushing, got pale and put her arm around my
+neck. Real love always has the right thing to say at the right time.
+
+"Phyllis," she whispered in a tickling fashion right against my ear,
+"when Douglass told me about it last night he came back in my room to
+say, 'Don't tell a single soul but Phyllis.'"
+
+If some accident should happen to make me famous, I wish the person
+that writes my biography could put down how I felt when Roxanne
+whispered that to me. I choked a little bit and Roxanne hugged the
+choke and was just beginning to tell me about the experiment when
+Lovelace Peyton called us to come to him.
+
+He is dreadfully spoiled since he has had to keep so still all the
+time, but we try to do just as he says. He lies there in bed and
+thinks up all the impossible things that might be done and then asks
+us to do them. He longed so for "squirms" that Tony got a wooden box
+and made little divisions and brings him in a lot of new ones almost
+every day. They fill Roxanne's days and nights with terror. And it is
+upsetting to see the fishing-worms in the dirt, while the hop-toad
+stays out on the bed a good deal of the time; but we have to stand it
+and smile at it in our voices while talking to him, even if we have
+terror in our faces. Yesterday Uncle Pompey spent most of his time
+catching the chickens and bringing them in for him to feel, and
+Lovelace Peyton has a box of straw on a chair by the bed, with a hen
+tied in it, setting on a dozen eggs.
+
+But a thing that stops my breath with pain is, that I am fraid that
+Lovelace Peyton is beginning to think about being blind, and my throat
+aches while I write what happened when Roxanne left him with me after
+he had called us.
+
+"Do you want me to read the medicine book, now, Lovelace Peyton? Mumps
+comes next," I said, as I sat down by the head of the bed, nearer than
+I liked to the setting hen.
+
+"No, Phyllie," he answered in a queer, unlifelike way. "Please find
+blind eyes and read all about them to me."
+
+"Oh, they are not interesting," I said, and the lump rose so I could
+hardly breathe. "Let me read measles, if you don't think you will like
+mumps. Do you remember that experiment about cutting away a piece of
+the heart itself that the man tried? Let me read that again." I was
+pleading with him so that my voice began to tremble.
+
+"Please let me put my hand on your face, Phyllie, so if I kin git you
+to tell the truth to me, I kin feel if you cry," he said as he reached
+up and put one little hand that is getting white and weak against my
+cheek. I forced my eyes to drink up the tears that they had let get as
+far as my lashes, and put my arm under his head and cuddled him
+against my shoulder, my shoulder that has had to learn to cuddle since
+he got hurt.
+
+"Is I going to be blind, Phyllie, and kin they be a blind doctor, if I
+am?" he asked, with his baby mouth set with the Byrd family
+expression, the first time I had ever seen it on his face.
+
+"Oh, no, Lovelace Peyton, No!" I exclaimed, hugging him up closer. "A
+great big doctor is coming on the cars in just a few days to make you
+well."
+
+"But _kin_ a doctor be a blind man, Phyllie," he asked again, with
+his mouth still set.
+
+"Yes, Lovelace Peyton, if you are the blind man," I answered as
+positively as I felt. It is true for if he is blind, then there will
+be a blind doctor in the world and a famous one at that.
+
+"Will you always go with me to tell me how the folks and sores and
+blood and things look, Phyllie, so I kin give the right medicine?" he
+asked, curling his fingers around mine in a still tighter grasp.
+
+"Yes, I will, indeed I will," I answered, with words that pushed their
+way from my heart.
+
+And just then Tony came in with Pink, in such a dejected manner that I
+hardly knew them. I knew from their looks and my own feelings that it
+was the quadratics we were going to have on examination Tuesday, and
+my deepest sympathy went out to them.
+
+"Say, Dr. Snakes," said Tony solemnly, as he sat down almost upon the
+toad on the bed by Lovey, "I've brought Pink, the Rosebud, to be
+operated on at my expense entirely. I have been trying to put algebra
+into his head for a solid hour, and now I want it split open so I can
+just chuck the book in whole to save my time. Shall I go get the axe?"
+
+And Lovelace Peyton laughed just as much at Tony as the rest of us
+did, though the hen got frightened and began to squawk so that both
+Tony and Pink had to work to tie her down tighter. They didn't need me
+right then, so I slipped out and went home through the garden.
+
+Oh, that doctor must come down here quick to see about those valuable
+eyes! I don't dare think what I will do if the article about Father
+fails, but I feel sure it won't. Still my heart beats as if it
+couldn't get all the blood it needs--and that reminds me that
+physiology comes on Wednesday. I ought to study, but I can't.
+
+And another thing that is worrying me is, that I didn't go to see what
+Mrs. Satterwhite wanted when she sent for me, and it might be that I
+could have spent some money if I had found out what she would like to
+have. I have been so busy and so scared that I haven't been down to
+the Public Square this week, and now I will have to go and shop all
+morning if I am to keep up the amount of the monthly bills.
+
+I wonder if Miss Priscilla would let me express my admiration for her
+by buying her one of those lovely boxes of paper with gold letters on
+each piece. I don't know anybody else in Byrdsville that they seem to
+match, and they cost five dollars, which the postmaster needs badly
+from the looks of his fringed cuffs and collars. Accepting a present
+is bestowing affectionate regard on the person that offers it, and I
+believe Miss Prissy feels that way about me. She must feel in her
+heart that I do not blame her course of conduct to the Colonel like
+the rest of Byrdsville does. I am more charitable to faults than
+others. I have to be. I believe I will risk the box of paper.
+
+But on the other hand, I am very fond of the Colonel and I feel that I
+would like him to know that I think he is very noble not to desert
+Miss Priscilla, even if she doesn't want to marry him. He is a
+faithful friend. I wonder if he would like that lovely long-stemmed
+pipe that is in the drug store? And I feel like I ought to do it, not
+to be partial. I won't buy him tobacco, for I feel sure that is a
+thing that women ought to fear to do for a man.
+
+This is a very lonely night, and I can't write any more because it
+reminds me to be uneasy about the express package in which I sent the
+article to Gilmore's Weekly.
+
+I am going down to sit in my mother's room in a dark corner to be
+comforted. That is my right and hers, too. I wonder if girls that have
+mothers that can be real mothers, tell them all their troubles and
+perplexities and anxieties, or do girls that have mothers not have the
+other things to tell them?
+
+But one thing before I close the ink-well I must record to my own
+satisfaction, though it seems mean to write it down. The Idol has no
+idea of paying any kind of attentions to Helena Kirby and it is all
+settled that he doesn't like her; or, rather, doesn't know she is
+living on the earth, which is still better. His lovely new gray suit
+didn't affect him at all in regard to her. Roxanne told me all about
+it several days ago.
+
+Of course, everybody in Byrdsville has been very much interested and
+sorry over Lovelace Peyton's explosion and his eyes, and they have all
+come and said so, and they hardly ever come empty-handed. Roxanne has
+got nice and plump eating the things, and so has Uncle Pompey, after
+their long cornmeal fast during the time of invention number one.
+
+But Belle's mother, Mrs. Kirby, and Helena hadn't come or done a
+single thing, until this occurred day before yesterday. Helena
+happened of her own accord to meet the Idol right at the cottage gate
+when he came home from the furnace, and she was most untastefully
+beautifully dressed. She had a large pink rose in her hand like a girl
+in a story-book. She stopped to smile on him with extreme favor and
+give him the rose, also out of a book. Roxanne saw and heard it all,
+because she couldn't help it, from the window.
+
+"Thank you, Miss Helena," he said with a grand bow. "I know Lovey will
+feel complimented at your thinking about him, and the rose will be
+lovely for him to smell and feel. He is better to-day, we hope--at
+least not so nervous."
+
+Roxanne says Helena's expression was of one completely surprised, and
+she went on down the street without any more use of the smile or the
+red silk and lace dress. If a man is at all interested in a girl, he
+would be sure to get more pleasure and conversation than that out of a
+rose, I feel sure. Oh, a genius has to be guarded from so many things!
+
+This is unkindness I've written, but I'm so nervous to-night over the
+thousand dollars that might not come for the article that I cannot
+control my pen. Good-night again, Louise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+This is Saturday night, or Sunday morning, I am not sure which, as I
+have let my clock and watch both run down, for I have not had time to
+wind them; but however late it is, I am going to write about all this
+remarkableness, to you, leather Louise, so I will never forget how it
+all really happened. And writing it may make me believe it is true,
+though now it all _will_ seem a dream.
+
+I got up early on account of the quadratics and had a contest, that
+lasted until ten o'clock, between them and a very overburdened mind. I
+conquered, but at what cost!
+
+But still, from the fight, one of the gratifications of my life came
+to me in the shape of the chance to help Belle. Mamie Sue has given up
+the study of algebra forever, and is going to take botany instead, but
+Belle is still having dreadful struggles. Mamie Sue told me about
+Belle having a wet towel around her head all night and other really
+tragic things that made me lose all my hurt at her and filled me with
+extreme sympathy. I was over at Roxanne's on my way to read diphtheria
+to Lovelace Peyton, and just as Mamie Sue was describing how the poor
+girl had to put her feet in hot water to take the chill off of them,
+down the street came Belle looking all that Mamie Sue had said of her.
+My heart was so wrung that I spoke before I had time to let her manner
+daunt me.
+
+"Oh, Belle," I said, with hasty enthusiasm, "I worked a lot this
+morning and I can solve them all now in the easiest way. Let me show
+you."
+
+"I--I wish you would, Phyllis, and thank you," she answered in a meek
+voice that was not hers at all. It had a nice, mournful, friendly tone
+to it that I wish it could keep even when the cause for sorrow is
+removed, which I succeeded in doing in about another hour of hard
+manual labor, if you call pounding manual labor. It is!
+
+Roxanne sat down beside us, and we sent Mamie Sue in to keep Lovelace
+Peyton quiet with her company; only to use the fudge from her pocket
+in case she couldn't succeed. We found them both later with chocolate
+smeared on their faces; but Lovelace Peyton likes Mamie Sue, for her
+easy nature is most lovable.
+
+"Thank you, Phyllis," said Belle, when we had figured the last formula
+as simply as I had found out how to do it. "I have always thought that
+you are as smart as anybody in the class, and I now think--"
+
+I wish Belle had had time to finish that sentence, for I don't believe
+she will be in such a nice temper for a long time; but we were
+interrupted by Tony and the Colonel and Miss Priscilla coming past my
+house and into the cottage front gate. The Colonel was dressed up in
+his white vest and Sunday hat, and Miss Priscilla was flying more
+ribbons and ruffles than usual, while I never saw Tony's grin quite so
+broad and his freckles shone out more than ever, as they always do
+when he is excited.
+
+"Miss Phyllis," said the Colonel, in his grand manner that everybody
+in Byrdsville tries to copy when there is anything important to be
+said, especially in public, like the mayor does in his speeches, "I
+have come to announce to you that this morning's mail has brought a
+great honor to you, and through you, to Byrdsville. Allow me to hand
+you this medal that is given you for the heroic feat of life-saving by
+the Girl Scouts of America, called, I believe, the Organization of the
+Campfire. I wrote on to inform the authorities of the deed of the
+Patrol Leader of the Palefaces, as your Girl Scout band is named, and
+this letter, with the accompanying medal, is the result. I am
+informally showing you the medal now, but the letter will be read and
+the medal presented at the commencement exercises of the Byrd
+Academy." And with a low bow that crinkled the stiff white vest, the
+Colonel handed me the medal.
+
+I was paralyzed--real paralysis of both mind and body, especially legs
+and tongue--and I believe I would have been sitting there on the front
+steps of the cottage yet, in a dumb and stupid manner, with them all
+looking at me, if Tony Luttrell who, as I have remarked before, is a
+very understanding person, though a boy, hadn't flared his eyes and
+mewed under his breath. Then we all laughed so loud that it brought
+Mamie Sue to the door though Lovelace Peyton called so loudly that
+Roxanne had to run to him; and so did Mamie Sue, with the treacherous
+chocolate smears on her mouth, after having promised not to give it to
+him unless she just had to.
+
+"Phyllis, if Tony says Kitten Patrol to you one single time more,
+something will have to be done to him that is serious," said Miss
+Priscilla, frowning at Tony with a frown that only seemed to bring out
+the dimple in her left cheek. "Now congratulate her nicely, Tony!"
+
+[Illustration: The Colonel handed me the medal]
+
+"Madam," said Tony, straightening up and looking so much like the
+Colonel that it was funny (but of course Tony has learned
+impersonation), "accept my heartfelt congratulations for thus
+achieving a triumph of kittenism. Will that do, Miss Prissy Bubble?"
+And again we all laughed, the Colonel the most of all, and even Belle
+a little, too.
+
+"Phyllis, you are one perfectly good brick," Tony said suddenly,
+dropping the teasing of Miss Priscilla from his voice; and he looked
+at me with just as affectionate an expression in his squinty eyes as
+when he looks at Pink Chadwell. It is a great thing for a girl to feel
+that a fine boy likes her as much as he does his most chosen boy
+comrade. I felt that keenly.
+
+"Thanks, everybody," I managed to say in an awkward way that mortified
+me into being unable to patch it up with any kind of brilliant remark
+following.
+
+One of the things that had struck me so dumb was that I thought I had
+refused to be the Girl Scout Leader because of my disgrace, and nobody
+had paid any attention to my refusal. Thus it is, a person cannot
+escape either fame or disgrace because other people take more interest
+in both than you do yourself, and do not let you forget.
+
+"And now that the Colonel has made you his speech, Phyllis," said Miss
+Priscilla, "I want you to come down to the Presbyterian Church parlors
+with me to a joint meeting of our Relief Society with the Methodist
+Relief. They want to make you an honorary member of both on account of
+the way you have dealt with the Satterwhites, who have for years been
+one of the greatest troubles to all of us. Of course this is not a
+medal, but it is an expression of hearty esteem, and I hope they will
+get the meeting over nicely without any discussion or argument coming
+up from either side on the charity question."
+
+By that time I was so numb from having shocks that I let her and the
+Colonel lead me down the street, while Tony went in to keep Lovelace
+Peyton from fretting for the diphtheria lesson until I could come
+back.
+
+Mrs. Luttrell made me the Methodist speech and Mrs. Willis the
+Presbyterian one, and they said so much that I felt sure they were
+glad that I was only expected to say "Thank you!" and then sit down
+while they all offered different resolutions about different things
+that were never exactly decided but voted on, nevertheless.
+
+When we came out of the church, I told Miss Priscilla about the box of
+paper in such a determined tone of voice that she didn't refuse it at
+all, and went with me to buy the pipe for the Colonel, which I know
+will make it very valuable to him when I tell him who helped select
+it. It is a very interesting thing to be neighbor and friend to a
+mysterious love affair that is one of the traditions of Byrdsville. I
+believe I have solved the why of the failure of their marriage to come
+off, but until I am certain I won't even write it to you, Louise.
+
+On my way home, I am glad to record, I took time to do a little
+shopping. I bought some buckets we didn't need from one of the
+littlest shops in town, some more groceries for the Satterwhites, a
+bolt of gingham to make Sallie Geraldine and Judy Claudia some aprons,
+then hurried back on the wings of anxiety to the bedside of Lovelace
+Peyton, to get the diphtheria started. As I ran I could just feel him
+thrashing around in the bed and persecuting Roxanne and Mamie Sue, if
+she had not already escaped for her life.
+
+But as fast as I tried to go, I met an interruption on the way up
+Providence Road, that was agreeable although detaining from duty. Tony
+and Pink and Sam stopped me and told me that they were just on their
+way to bring me to the Crotch, and that I would be the first strange
+person that had ever seen it, since they had fixed it up in the
+Luttrell barn loft to have Scout meetings in. Mr. Douglass had planned
+and helped them with it, and they said there never was such a place of
+interest in Byrdsville. The reason they were going to show me was that
+I must get the empty room over the garage Father has turned the old
+family stable of the Byrds into, to make a wigwam for the Paleface
+Patrol to have meetings and keep things in. They had asked Mamie Sue
+to go with me because it would take two girls to remember all they
+saw, and that would be the last time we could come there, though they
+would come often to the Wigwam if we wanted them to show us how to be
+as scouty as possible.
+
+Just then Mamie Sue came up, and she either snorted with indignation
+or choked with candy, I cannot tell which; but because we had to, we
+accepted their kind invitation with gratitude. We stopped at the house
+first and told Mrs. Luttrell we were going to the barn with the boys,
+and she said not to get hurt or fall, and gave us a tea-cake all
+around. Mamie Sue held the plate and happened to get two, not at all
+by intention, for they were stuck together.
+
+Tony swung up from the horse trough to the loft by a pole, while Sam
+and Pink stayed to push us up. I went up just as easily as Tony did,
+before they had time to push me one inch, but poor Mamie Sue stuck
+halfway through the trap-door and we thought we would never be able to
+get her either up or down without calling out the fire-company, as Sam
+suggested; but she kept astonishingly cool herself and wiggled in just
+the way Tony told her to, and at last got up. She said she knew that
+she could fall down all right, when the time came to go, so for us not
+to worry about that, and we proceeded to enjoy the Crotch.
+
+I never dreamed boys could get together so many remarkable things and
+make it so interesting to tell about them. The big kettle to boil
+water and the poles and the sticks and the blankets and tin cups and
+plates were in one corner and a shelf held the knapsacks with the
+"first aid" things in the opposite corner. All of Sam's bird-eggs, the
+collection of which he had seen the error of, and had to give up when
+he became a Scout, was on a table by the window, and his butterflies
+were pinned on large pieces of brown paper on the wall and looked like
+a beautiful decoration.
+
+And while we looked at the things it had taken the boys so long to
+collect, I rejoiced that I could manage to spend a lot of money to fix
+up the Wigwam, and told them about each thing that I could buy, as I
+thought it up, from seeing something that they had.
+
+"Say, Bubble, is the long pole for exercise going to be braced so the
+Dumpling can go over without danger?" said Tony, in the teasing voice
+he uses to girls, that doesn't make them mad.
+
+"I think we ought to have every single thing that girls can use to
+make them as strong as boys," I answered. "When girls are strong
+enough not to be any burden, the boys will take them everywhere they
+go and everybody will have just twice as much fun."
+
+"I suppose you would like to make the boys learn to do tatting and
+sewing to let them in on that sort of kitten gatherings," said Sam,
+with a laugh that was not so nice as Tony's.
+
+"We would, if it wasn't for the fact that Petway does the knitting act
+so well that he is a perfect lady. We never could equal him," answered
+Tony, with jolly good humor to save our feelings from being hurt by
+Sam.
+
+"Well, I don't believe it will hurt--" I was just going to say, when
+we heard Uncle Pompey, calling down in the barn for me to please come
+quick before Lovelace Peyton killed them all dead.
+
+We all slid down, including Mamie Sue, with astonishing grace, and I
+promised to begin to fix the Wigwam next week. I promised, but a pain
+hit my heart. Did I know that I would be in Byrdsville next week or
+ever again? What would Father do when that prosecution found him? For
+ten days I had not been letting myself think about the future, but it
+seems that every minute I live in Byrdsville, my heart winds around my
+friends and theirs around mine. To take me away now would be to tear
+me--but where was Father, and why didn't I hear what he is going to do
+and have done to him?
+
+As I once more hurried down the street to the diphtheria lesson, it
+seemed to me that Byrdsville broke on me all suddenly as a lovely and
+maybe to-be-lost vision. All the leaves have come out on the trees and
+vines now, and everybody's yard is in bloom and is full of sweet
+odors. Doors and windows stand wide open and people sit on their front
+porches and visit back and forth like every evening was a great big
+party. And amid it all I have felt like I belonged to something for
+the first time in my life.
+
+Then suddenly it came true that now I do belong. This is how it
+happened! Just as I had got to Lovelace Peyton and soothed him by a
+few lines of the symptoms of fever and nausea and headache that come
+first in diphtheria, Roxanne stood at the door with a telegram in her
+hand for me, and my heart stopped beating while it took leaps all over
+my body, about fifty to the second. I promised Lovelace Peyton a half
+dozen rolls of antiseptic bandages and a paper of sticking-plaster and
+a June-bug, if I could find one, to let me into the living-hall to
+read it. I felt that if it said, "No," about the secret article I
+couldn't trust myself not to let him know that something was the
+matter.
+
+It didn't say "No!" Wait, I'll copy it, Louise!
+
+    A payment of one thousand dollars for articles from you will
+    be in Byrdsville on Saturday. Letter follows.
+
+    COUSIN GILMORE.
+
+My knees shook under me, and my eyes couldn't take in the letters
+well, but I asked Roxanne, who was standing waiting to hear what the
+telegram could be about, just as a friend should feel over a telegram,
+to run out to the shed and get our Idol quick, and I would tell them
+all about it together. He came in looking perfectly beautiful with his
+coat off and a big apron on him. His eyes were just as excited as mine
+felt, now that the mist had cleared, and it seemed to me even in that
+moment that no other thousand dollars in the world could have brought
+so much suspense and excitement as this one had.
+
+But I knew that I might have a battle to fight in which I must win,
+and I steadied my nerves and made myself feel like Father looks when
+he reads important letters and begins to dictate answers in telegrams.
+
+"Mr. Douglass Byrd," I said, perfectly coolly over my own inward
+volcano, "you remember you promised me that if I could use my own
+brains on a plan to get the doctor here for Lovelace Peyton's eyes,
+you would let me do it?"
+
+"Yes, I said just about that," he answered me, and he looked in my
+eyes in a depending way that was so like Lovelace Peyton used to do
+that again the mist came over my eyes. I am getting to have that
+proper mist now instead of the choke, and I am glad, because it can be
+hid better than a choke.
+
+"Well, I found the plan and worked it for us, and I will have the
+thousand dollars by night-time, and we can get the doctor from
+Cincinnati by to-morrow, and have it all over before the algebra
+examination on Monday," I answered.
+
+Then, in very many less words than I have used to tell about it to
+you, Louise, I told him what I had done, with Roxanne standing with
+her arm across my shoulders, that trembled with excitement. To cap off
+the climax of the story in proper fashion, as we are taught in the
+rhetoric to do, I handed him the telegram--and I felt like the Colonel
+looks when I did it. He stood for what seemed hours, with the telegram
+in his hand, and something makes me suspect that he was having the
+same hard time as I was having with a choke, only this was the first
+time and it came very near resulting in weeping, which I had never
+done up to that time.
+
+"It is a wonderful thing for you to have done, dear," he said at last,
+with a look that got down to the core of my inexperienced heart and
+made it thump uncomfortably. "And if there were no other way to get
+the doctor for the kiddy's eyes I would accept this loan gladly, but I
+have heard in the morning mail, that I can sell the Washington letters
+and I am going immediately to arrange about it that way. You know,
+though, how great it was of you to do this, and how it makes us all
+love you. We don't have to tell--"
+
+But here he was interrupted by an avalanche of words that must have
+been dammed up in me for all the fifteen years of my life for that
+special occasion, and I delivered them with an eloquence that must
+have equaled that famous valedictory of Colonel Stockell's at the Byrd
+Academy, the year he left for the war. I told him just what a lonely
+life had been broken into by the sunshine of Roxanne's and Lovelace
+Peyton's and his family affection for me, and now they were just the
+core of my heart, which he was wounding. I described in detail how I
+had suffered when Roxanne and Lovelace Peyton had been hungry, and had
+been brought to the dishonesty of feeding him in private, with never a
+word of my suffering to hurt that Byrd family pride that they are
+turning as a weapon on me. I even mentioned the patches on his
+trousers and the break in Roxanne's shoes that had been patches and
+rents in my own heart. I tried to make them see how hard it had been
+when I have been commanded to buy things for people that I didn't care
+about hardly at all, except as fellow-beings, when I was hungry to
+give what was needed to my most beloved. By this time I had got to the
+point of exaltation, and Roxanne had hid her head on my shoulder,
+while that Idol's eyes were so wide with astonishment that I thought
+he would never be able to get them to normal size again. "And after
+Lovelace Peyton has hurt himself in my cause, as he did from hearing
+that I wanted an explosion," I still ruthlessly continued, "you want
+to deny me the happiness of getting his eyes saved by my own unaided
+efforts. When I was disgraced and humiliated, I put that kind of pride
+I had aside and came to you when you called me because you needed me,
+trusting in your friendship for me and love of me, but now that the
+time has come for you to yield just a little bit of your pride, you
+won't do it for me."
+
+Here I paused, and a thought of explanation for their cruelty came
+over me. "Because I am my father's daughter, do you think this money I
+have made is tainted, too? And is that the reason why you don't want
+to use it?"
+
+"Oh, Phyllis!" Roxanne gasped under my chin, and the Idol got as white
+as a sheet and his eyes looked like I had struck him a blow.
+
+"You can't get the money from the telegraph office and give it to me
+quick enough, kiddie," he said, with the choke coming out clear in his
+voice. "Forgive me! The youngster's eyes will be twice the value saved
+in such a way," and he took my hand and held it in both of his against
+his heart, in a manner to make me feel that never again would I have
+to struggle with that Byrd pride.
+
+"Please forgive me for fighting you like that," I said with a horrible
+blush of memory coming over me as I thought of all I had said, about
+the patches on the trousers especially. "You made me do it and--"
+
+But here we were interrupted as an apparition stood in the door and
+regarded the sad and joyful tableau we made with its head on one side,
+right corner of the mouth up, and left eyelid drooped. It was Father,
+and I had never seen him look so grand or with such a noble expression
+on his face! And as he stood still and looked at us, I held my breath
+far longer than it is safe to do. And as Father looked, the Idol drew
+himself up and his head took on the pose of the feminine Byrd
+portrait, but he still held my hand in both of his as he looked Father
+steadily in the face. I was scared and so was Roxanne as we hugged
+each other as women always do from fright.
+
+Then, without a word, Father walked right up under the portrait and
+took the Idol by both shoulders and gave him one good shake that
+tottered us all.
+
+"You young idiot, you! You young idiot!" he said in a tone of such
+affection that it was unbelievable to my ears. And as I heard it, I
+knew that all my trials and disgraces and puzzlings were over, and I
+turned my head upon Roxanne's back hair and wept tears, the first time
+in my life--and I hope not the last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+"Now, see here, Phil, don't give out on the situation like that," said
+Father, as he slapped me on the back to still the tears while Roxanne
+hugged me and the Idol still held my hand.
+
+"Please go on and tell what you did or didn't do to the 'secret,'" I
+sobbed, but I stood on my own feet again and was using both my natural
+hands to wipe my eyes.
+
+The Idol had been for minutes standing and looking at Father like a
+child that has just awakened and doesn't know whether the awful thing
+that was pursuing him was a dream or a real bear. Roxanne was the
+first one to speak, and as usual she had seen the rosy side of
+something, even if it was not the real thing.
+
+"You didn't really steal the secret at all, did you, Mr. Forsythe?"
+she asked, with her lovely and engaging enthusiasm. "I just knew it,
+all the time."
+
+"Yes, I did 'steal the secret'--if that is the way you put it--_pro
+tem_, which means 'for the time being.' You are a nest of very
+young idiots, and I trusted to that; but you opened your puppy eyes at
+the time I hadn't counted on, with the help of Luttrell's scouting
+nose." He paused, as if not right sure that he was going to tell about
+everything, and as he looked at us we did look like a basket of little
+silly puppies with mouths and eyes wide open--the Idol most of all.
+
+"And now first, young man," said Father, turning to Mr. Douglass, left
+eyelid drooping lower than usual, "I just want to say to you what I
+think of you for leaving not only all the traces of such a valuable
+discovery unprotected in a shed, but leaving your notebook and
+drawings, too. Any other man but a Byrd of Byrdsville, would not have
+trusted the book off his person a half minute, and would have
+destroyed the traces of each experiment the minute it was done. Those
+steel shavings were the most idiotic-looking things I ever saw, and
+when I emptied the box it was with a groan at your foolishness. Just
+the looks of 'em kept me from trusting you with my intentions. I
+couldn't afford to run the risk of your carelessness, so I took the
+whole thing and decamped with it."
+
+"Oh, Father!" I gasped, beginning to get the untrustful feeling again.
+
+"Hush, Phyllis," said the Idol, looking at Father like he was Jack,
+the Giant-Killer, and just about as much interested as if it was not
+his own tremendous fortune Father was telling about taking off with
+him.
+
+"I had been down in the garden to the garage to give the new car a
+looking over, and I saw Rogers go into that shed and knew, from having
+been told by Phyllis accidentally of the steel experiments, what was
+happening. I followed him a little later, and saw your trustful
+layout, exposed to the world as is the human nature of all Byrdsville.
+Rogers is an expert and would run through your notebook and get the
+whole thing in a few seconds. I knew that he would watch his time, try
+out the experiments at the furnace, and get the patent while you were
+deliberating about proceeding in a Chesterfieldian manner with an
+injunction drawn slowly and literarily by your friend, Judge Luttrell.
+Rogers was fully equipped by his association with me to do you
+and--quick. I took no such chances as having you and the Judge's
+Byrdsvillianism mixed up in the affair. I stole your secret that had
+been stolen, left for a Pennsylvania furnace the next morning, had
+experimental furnaces built, tried out the experiments before the
+company, keeping dust in Rogers's eyes by demanding to be in on his
+robbery, patented it by push-legislation in Washington, and am back
+with an offer of fifty thousand dollars down and a royalty to be
+decided upon in a ten-year contract. I have a great mind to put it in
+trust for you, idiotic dreamer that you are--and perhaps the most
+noted man in the field of commercial invention for this year at any
+rate! How did you come to think out that process of a disturbance of
+atomic arrangement at that temperature?"
+
+"Why, you see, Mr. Forsythe, in the laboratory at Princeton, just
+before I left, I had begun some atomic experiments, and out at the
+furnace it struck me all of a heap, what it would do if we could treat
+the ore at some ascertained temperature in the way I have found. Now,
+in another case that I am working on, I may be able even to make the
+process--"
+
+"Help!" said Father. "Let's get down to business on this proposition
+before we get to the other one."
+
+And we all laughed, for it was funny to see the Idol with patches on
+his trousers and hardly a day's living ahead, pass right over the
+fifty thousand dollars, with more in the contract, and all the
+sensation it had made, to begin to explain about what was out in the
+shed now. He looked pained at our interruption and tried to begin
+again, but Father interrupted him.
+
+"Well, have you told this one to these 'bubbles,' as my young friend
+Luttrell so appropriately calls them? By the way, the economical
+Rogers had on the coat that Dr. Byrd had doctored for the cholera,
+which I had asked him to destroy for me, and the Scout Leader was
+right in his nose clue. I suppose that was what led him to suspect me
+and shadow Rogers to the telegraph office. Great boy, that Luttrell!
+But to return to the girls: If you have told Phyllis, I shall have to
+keep her in solitary confinement until it is finished. Miss Roxanne, I
+know, can be trusted at large."
+
+I knew Father was just joking, by the eyelid and the corner of his
+mouth, but the Idol drew himself up according to the old portrait
+again before he spoke.
+
+"Mr. Forsythe" he said, "I haven't any secret that Phyllis can't know.
+If she accidentally gave this one away to Rogers--she can the next,
+_and_ the next." He took my hand again and drew me close to him.
+To think that that wonderful Idol should feel like that about
+insignificant me!
+
+And father looked as impressed as he ought to have been, and begged my
+pardon in the proper manner; only I saw the bat in his eyes that
+showed how amused he was.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "Phyllis is a dangerous person to tell secrets
+to, or even to live an ordinary life before. Her penetration is so
+keen that she sees a man in his true character--and gets a thousand
+dollars from him for her estimate of his personality. I am glad to buy
+the opinion of me that you sent your cousin Gilmore at a thousand
+dollars, Phyllis,--it is worth more than that to me--from you!" His
+eyes were very tender to me though then, laughing: "Want to see
+yourself as she sees you in this thousand-dollar book I'm going to
+have printed, Byrd?" he asked teasingly.
+
+"Oh, no!" I gasped; "I hoped he would never see that! Don't give him
+one, if you bought it. Don't even talk about it!" Let's go telegraph
+the doctor--we have forgotten the eyes too long now."
+
+"That will not be necessary," said Father, with the lovely look that
+comes into his face when Lovelace Peyton is even mentioned. "When I
+read your letter to Gilmore, I hunted around immediately and brought
+the best man in New York with me to see to those eyes. He is over at
+the house getting rested and ready, and will have to make his
+examination in less than an hour now, so you two had better hustle to
+get Dr. Byrd ready for him. Everything must be antiseptic."
+
+Antiseptic, with those fishing worms and the hen and the pet toad and
+the June bugs in his bed! Roxanne fled, calling Uncle Pompey on her
+way.
+
+"Then my thousand dollars won't--won't be needed?" I asked with a
+contemptible feeling of disappointment that the Byrds had got so rich
+before I had been able to do this one thing for them. I looked up at
+old Grandmother Byrd over the mantelpiece and said in my heart: "You
+have won."
+
+But what happened then? The Idol, with the comprehension which is one
+of the symptoms of all genius, turned to me quickly and put his arm
+across my shoulder.
+
+"Phyllis," he said, with his most wonderful eyes shining down into
+mine, "that check is going to the doctor just as soon as your Father
+gives it to you. I told you that Lovey's eyes would be more valuable
+if saved by you--and--and I meant it."
+
+I didn't have to say anything, and I couldn't--he understood! I just
+clung!
+
+"Young idiots, both of you," said Father; but he blew his nose
+violently, and I knew from experience how the lump in his throat felt.
+"Now take me in to see Dr. Byrd."
+
+"Howdy," said Lovey, as Father shook hands with him and the toad at
+the same time. "Did you get any more cholera? Did the medicine work?"
+
+"Yes, the medicine worked--more ways than one," answered Father with a
+pleased laugh. And he talked to Lovelace Peyton all the time about a
+man who got blown up in a mine that he saw in Pennsylvania, so that he
+made no objections while Uncle Pompey took out all his "live stock."
+
+While the Idol and Roxanne and I did up the room, with his own hands
+Father bathed Lovelace Peyton and put on his clean, patched little
+night-clothes; and I saw one big tear, that came from the very bottom
+of the big man's heart, I know, splash on the biggest patch, as he was
+guiding the little groping hands into the armhole.
+
+Then while I was buttoning Roxanne into a clean dress and the Idol was
+carrying out the last mop, the doctor came in the front door. I was so
+dirty with the cleaning that I retired to the kitchen and helped the
+Idol into his collar and coat and to get his hands clean so he could
+hurry on in to help. Uncle Pompey had got his usual violent spell of
+asthma and I had just lighted his pipe for him when the Idol came back
+to the door of the kitchen.
+
+"You'll have to come, Phyllis," he said, with a smile that took the
+anxiety off his face for an instant. "Lovey refuses to let the doctor
+touch him without you. Come quick! The doctor says the light is
+beginning to go."
+
+I went, soiled dress and crying eyes and hair all rumpled and mussed
+with the excitement.
+
+"Phyllie," said Lovelace Peyton, who was sitting up in bed defying
+them all, "I ain't a-going to let that doctor touch me 'thout you
+stand right here and tell me how it all looks just as he does it.
+Don't leave out any bleed that comes, or any blue flesh or nerves or
+nothing. You know how, 'cause I have teached you. Neither Doug or Roxy
+ain't no good with symptoms."
+
+"I will, Lovelace Peyton, I will," I answered; but I shuddered, for
+how could I stand to see him tortured, as I felt he was going to be?
+
+[Illustration: "You stand right here and tell me how it all looks"]
+
+But I did--and it makes me weak to think about it now so that I shake
+all over. As the instruments pried and pulled and injected the aseptic
+solutions I held his hand tight and talked as hard as I could. At the
+worst places I told the most awful lies about how horrible it looked
+and placed all the frightful symptoms of every disease I had read to
+him, right in his eyes. It sounded dreadful but I knew that it
+interested him and helped in a way nothing else could.
+
+"Go on, Phyllie, tell more," he would groan as I stopped for
+breath--and on I would go piling inflammation on suppuration.
+
+Finally, after what seemed an age, the doctor drew a long sigh and
+looked up at me with a kindly expression that I knew meant "saved."
+For a minute I reeled, and I do believe I would have learned what
+fainting meant the same day I learned crying, if those little fingers
+hadn't held on to me tight while the doctor gave just a whiff of
+chloroform to ease the twitching nerves. He had been obliged to do the
+operation without it, but risked just the whiff.
+
+"Don't the chloroform smell good, Phyllie?" Lovelace Peyton whispered
+up to me as he floated off and his hands relaxed.
+
+"That was the most remarkable performance I ever participated in,"
+said the doctor out in the hall after he had finished telling us how
+near the sight of both eyes had come to being destroyed from not being
+kept drained. "And the two youngsters are the most remarkable I have
+yet encountered. Miss Phyllis, let me congratulate you on a nerve and
+a talent for imaginative description the like of which I have never
+met before. But please somebody explain that boy to me before I catch
+the train."
+
+I was glad Roxanne was the one to begin on the subject of Lovelace
+Peyton, for only she had enough rosy words to describe him. She did
+better than I ever heard her before, and I could see how Father and
+the doctor both enjoyed it.
+
+"We will take him right away to college where he can learn to read and
+write for himself, in just a few months, and then to operate in some
+big hospital before he comes down South to cure hookworm and pellagra
+and all the other things other doctors haven't found out about. What
+medical college would you advise, Doctor?" she ended by asking, and
+her face was so lovely and enthusiastic that it looked almost
+inspired. There is no telling where Roxanne's dreams will land the
+family now that they will have the money to start on them.
+
+"Well, Miss Byrd," answered the doctor in a tone of voice, that made
+me know that he appreciated Roxanne at her true worth, "right now, for
+about ten years, I would keep the small doctor in Byrdsville, mostly
+out grubbing for experiments and 'squirms,' as he calls them. Then
+when the time comes we shall see--we shall see."
+
+"Yes," answered Father, dropping his head with the corner of his mouth
+screwed up. "Yes, we shall see!"
+
+And as he said it, somehow I felt that the Byrd family would never any
+more be unlooked after, and that it was good to have such a man as
+Father for a father and a neighbor. And, Oh, I felt--I can't write it,
+I am so tired I will have to go to sleep with a "Thank God," as big as
+can come from a heart the size mine is--which feels bigger to-night
+than it ever did before. Good-night, Louise of leather!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+The quadratics were awful! I got ninety-five by a lot of it being luck
+that I knew the questions, and Tony got eighty by the same process, he
+says; but Belle and Pink just squeezed through by the skin of their
+teeth. Sam didn't pass and neither did the tallest Willis. The other
+one got seventy and the right to take another examination. Cruelty to
+children like that kind of examination ought to be stopped by law.
+
+And that is the reason I haven't written in this leather confidante
+after that Saturday, into which at least four years of my life were
+crowded. By the calendar I am still just sixteen, but I am twenty by
+actual count.
+
+First--Father is a Raccoon in full standing, and is going to be Scout
+Master for a little troop just the minute Lovelace Peyton gets old
+enough to organize one. And other honors have come to him like--but I
+must put things down in an orderly fashion for Father as he has bought
+you on a book, Louise.
+
+Miss Priscilla is going to marry the Colonel. The secret of the why of
+her not doing it before is out. I have always felt that Miss Priscilla
+was honorable and not cruel. The Colonel had never asked her before,
+and it seems that the Stockell pride is very like the Byrd pride. He
+lost his fortune during the war and she is rich. His honor forbade!
+But Father has got him to go on a board of directors of the Cumberland
+Coal and Iron Company. Father says to give tone to directors'
+meetings, but that reason is not to be mentioned. He gets a salary of
+fifteen hundred dollars and is willing to marry on that, as Miss
+Priscilla insists on it. He told me all about it and so did she.
+
+Tony, also, was in the confidence of both for these last few days
+which was a great comfort, as he is always so full of plans to
+accomplish things. In fact, it was Tony that made Miss Priscilla send
+for the Colonel with determination and it was I who got the salary
+fixed with Father and urged the Colonel to respond to her summons.
+They are as happy as "Love's young dream continued into maturity." I
+quote the Colonel exactly, as I think it is a literary gem.
+
+Being the best-man at the wedding is one of the honors that has come
+to Father. I reminded him that the Colonel is not only a Stockell but
+he is a Confederate hero. Father said that he appreciated all that and
+that was what the salary was for.
+
+"Bubble," said Tony, as he sat on the bench in our garden and fanned
+himself with his hat, "now that you have got the old town geared up
+and jogging along smoothly with your almost boylike energy, let's
+forget all about 'em and get ready a really humming Scout-Campfire
+ceremonial for the second night of commencement. I have got one
+gruesome idea I will be ready to tell you about to-morrow. We needn't
+let in Roxy or the Dumpling or the other Kittens until it is all
+fixed, for they will be frozen with fear at the very idea of what will
+be a Scout initiation, all right enough. But they'll do as you say
+when the time comes, for the whole bubble bunch, including Belle,
+since her algebra get-away, fall at any word you dope out to 'em from
+now on. Well done for you! You are not only a brick, Phyllis, but a
+whole wall of them that can be depended upon to line up to the mark."
+
+I wrote that down not to be conceited, but I want to preserve that
+opinion of me in you, Louise, because it means that I have, in a
+little way, deserved the happiness that has come to me.
+
+I came to this town a sad and lonely girl, with a great sorrow that
+had kept me from being like other people and with a great distrust of
+my father, who had had to be both Father and Mother to me. I have
+found friends and interests and excitement and adventure and sympathy
+and encouragement out here under that Old Harpeth Hill and I am always
+going to keep them. I hope I never will go one step out of Byrdsville
+as long as I live, though Roxanne has planned trips to every corner of
+the world for us as soon as the Idol has finished this next invention.
+
+The Byrds have to stay in the cottage until Father can build another
+house for us to move into. Of course they will go back to Byrd Mansion
+and reign in it as they have always done. But I smile to myself that
+one person got ahead of that stiff-necked old portrait--I did, and
+once she even seemed to smile down on me.
+
+This was the time she seemed to do it. We had all been talking about
+the plans for the new house down in the orchard, for Father and me,
+when Roxanne had to fly to Lovelace Peyton and Father tiptoed after
+her just to peep at him a second. That left the Idol and me alone for
+a few minutes. How I would have shuddered at the mere thought of such
+a thing happening to me a few months ago, but now it just seemed
+agreeable happiness. Through suffering I have grown bold, in my
+adoration of him.
+
+"Let him build his old house, Phyllis," he said with first a glance up
+at the old Grandmother Byrd and then one at me that was as bashful as
+I began all suddenly to feel again, when he took my hand in his. "He
+won't--won't keep you--that is, not many years--will he?"
+
+"Why,--what do you--" I began to ask him, when Father came back into
+the room and I don't know to this day what the Idol meant to say, nor
+do I yet know what he meant by drawing himself up to his full Byrd
+pride height, while he looked Father straight in the eye, both of them
+alarmingly serious, until Father's eyes began to smile with what
+seemed to be warm confidence. At which the Idol let go my hand and
+began to talk about steel. Oh, I am so glad, glad I am here to help
+Roxanne to cherish such a genius as he is and that I know now for our
+whole lives no pride or anything cruel can come between him and me any
+more! I can keep him perpetually safe on the pedestal of my love and I
+feel that it will be my right to help feed and patch him--only now he
+can always buy new trousers.
+
+And for all time I have found Father!
+
+That night when I went in to commune with Mother like I do now more
+and more, I found him in my chair in the corner but out of her sight,
+and he drew me down on his knee for the first time in all my life. We
+sat quiet awhile and then he came into my room with me and we stood at
+the window and looked out over the Harpeth Valley, where Providence
+Road lay like a silver ribbon as it wound its way over Providence
+Knob. He had his arm around me, and as I have learned to do, I put my
+head down on his shoulder.
+
+"Phil," he said with such sadness in his voice that the new-learned
+tears started, "this is all we will ever have of Bess. The doctor says
+she has begun to drift faster now, and it will not be long. What would
+I have done if I had lost even what she had been to me these sad
+years--before I found you to help me?"
+
+Then, after the first time I had ever cried on my father's breast, he
+told me all about himself, and the money and how he came to make it,
+and how it was all wrong, but it has never been his personal dishonor
+that was involved. This invention of the Idol gives him more power
+than ever, and he is going to use it to reorganize things so that
+everybody will make more for their work and belong in the business. He
+has appointed Judge Luttrell one of the lawyers and Mr. Chadwell one
+of the directors--and he is going to try to stay in Byrdsville most of
+the time and I am to help him arrange about keeping out of the
+temptation of riches.
+
+"And I'll try not to develop Byrdsville anymore than I can help,
+Phil," he said as he wiped my eyes on his handkerchief and then his
+own.
+
+No, I hope Byrdsville will stay just as it is, and I hope that any one
+who needs friends like I did will find Byrdsville, Tennessee, on the
+map. Good-night and good-by, leather Louise!
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHYLLIS***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 15093.txt or 15093.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/0/9/15093
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+