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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lydia of the Pines, by Honoré Willsie Morrow
+
+
+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: Lydia of the Pines
+
+
+Author: Honoré Willsie Morrow
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 4, 2005  [eBook #16803]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYDIA OF THE PINES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+LYDIA OF THE PINES
+
+by
+
+HONORÉ WILLSIE
+
+Author of
+
+"The Heart of the Desert," "Still Jim," etc.
+
+With Frontispiece in Colors by Eric Papse
+
+   [Transcriber's note: frontispiece missing from book.]
+
+A. L. Burt Company
+Publishers------New York
+Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I  THE TOY BALLOON
+    II  THE HEROIC DAY
+   III  THE COTTAGE
+    IV  THE RAVISHED NEST
+     V  ADAM
+    VI  THE COOKING CLASS
+   VII  THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE
+  VIII  THE NOTE
+    IX  THE ELECTION
+     X  THE CAMP
+    XI  LYDIA GIGGLES
+   XII  THE HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR
+  XIII  THE INDIAN CELEBRATION
+   XIV  THE HARVARD INSTRUCTOR
+    XV  THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS
+   XVI  DUCIT AMOR PATRIAE
+  XVII  THE MILITARY HOP
+ XVIII  THE END OF A GREAT SEARCH
+   XIX  CAP AND GOWN
+    XX  THE YOUNGEST SCHOLAR
+
+
+
+
+LYDIA OF THE PINES
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE TOY BALLOON
+
+
+"I am the last of my kind.  This is the very peak of loneliness."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+There is a State in the North Mississippi Valley unexcelled for its
+quiet beauty.  To the casual traveler there may be a certain monotony
+in the unending miles of rolling green hills, stretching on and on into
+distant, pale skies.  But the native of the State knows that the
+monotony is only seeming.
+
+He knows that the green hills shelter in their gentle valleys many
+placid lakes.  Some of them are shallow and bordered with wild rice.
+Some are couched deep in the hollow of curving bluffs.  Some are
+carefully secreted in virgin pine woods.  From the train these pines
+are little suspected.  Fire and the ax have long since destroyed any
+trace of their growth along the railway.
+
+Yet if the traveler but knew, those distant purple shadows against the
+sky-line are primeval pine woods, strange to find in a State so highly
+cultivated, so dotted with thriving towns.
+
+In summer the whole great State is a wonderland of color.  Wide wheat
+lands of a delicate yellowish green sweep mile on mile till brought to
+pause by the black green of the woods.  Mighty acres of corn land,
+blue-green, march on the heels of the wheat.  Great pastures riotous
+with early goldenrod are thick dotted with milk herds.  White
+farmhouses with red barns and little towns with gray roofs and green
+shaded streets dot the State like flower beds.
+
+An old State, as we measure things out of New England, settled by New
+Englanders during the first great emigration after the War of 1812.
+Its capital, Lake City, lays claim to almost a century of existence.
+Lying among the hills in the northern part of the State, it contains
+both the state capitol and the state university.  Of its thirty
+thousand inhabitants, five thousand are students and another five
+thousand are state legislators and state employees.
+
+The town is one of quiet loveliness.  It lies in the curving shore of
+one of the most beautiful of the little inland lakes.  The university
+campus lies at the northern end of the curve.  The dome of the capitol
+rises from the trees at the southern end.  Between, deep lawns stretch
+to the water's edge with fine old houses capping the gentle slope of
+the shore.  Inland lies the business section of the town, with the less
+pretentious of the dwellings.  The whole city is dotted with great elms
+and maples, planted three quarters of a century ago.
+
+A quiet town, Lake City, with an atmosphere that might well belong to
+New England,--beauty, culture, leisure, are its hallmarks.
+
+Fifteen years ago half a mile inland from the lake was an empty block
+that once had been a farm pasture.  Three fine old oaks stood with tops
+together in the center of the block.  The grass was still firm and
+green and thick in the ancient pasture except for narrow trails worn by
+children's feet.  To the initiated each trail told its own story.
+There was a hollow square that formed the baseball diamond.  There was
+a straight, short cut that led to the little cress-grown spring.  There
+were the parallel lines for "Come-Come Pull Away," and there were
+numerous bald spots, the center of little radiating trails where, in
+the fall, each group of children had its complicated roasting oven in
+which potatoes and "weenies" were cooked.
+
+On one August afternoon the pasture seemed deserted.  It was circus day
+and the children of the surrounding blocks had all by one method or
+another won admission to the big tent on the hill east of the town.
+
+Yet not quite all the children.  For under one of the oak trees was a
+baby carriage in which a little girl of two lay fast asleep.  And far
+above her, perched lightly but firmly in a swaying fork of the oak, was
+a long-legged little girl of twelve.  She sat where she could peer
+easily down on her small sleeping sister, yet high enough to be
+completely hidden from casual view.  She was a thin youngster, with
+short curling hair of a dusty yellow.  The curly hair did not hide the
+fine square head, a noble head for so small a girl, set well on the
+little square shoulders.  Her eyes were blue and black lashed, her nose
+nondescript, her mouth large, her chin square and her little jaw line
+long and pronounced.  She wore a soiled sailor suit of blue galatea.
+Caught in the crotch of two opposite branches was a doll almost as
+large as the sleeping child below.  It was a queer old-fashioned doll,
+with a huge china head, that displayed brilliant black hair and eyes as
+blue as those of her little mistress.  The doll wore a clumsily made
+sailor suit of blue calico, which evidently had been washed recently,
+but not ironed.  It is necessary to meet the doll properly, for she was
+an intimate and important member of the little girl's family.  Her name
+was Florence Dombey.
+
+A battered red book lay in Florence Dombey's lap.  It was called, "With
+Clive in India."  It was written by G. A. Henty and told of the
+marvelous and hair-breadth adventures of an English lad in an Indian
+campaign.
+
+Florence Dombey's attention, however, was not on the book.  It was
+riveted, hectically, on her mistress, who with her tongue caught
+between her lips was deftly whittling a cigar box cover into doll
+furniture, of a scale so tiny that even had Florence Dombey had a doll
+of her own, it could not have hoped to use the furniture.
+
+It was very quiet in the oak tree.  The little furniture-maker spoke
+softly to Florence Dombey occasionally, but otherwise crickets and
+locusts made the only sounds on the summer air.
+
+Suddenly she closed the knife sharply.  "Darn it!  I've cut myself
+again," she said.  She dropped the knife down the neck of her blouse
+and began to suck her finger.  "Here, let me have Henty, Florence
+Dombey.  Don't try to pig it, all the time.  You know I don't get
+hardly any time to read."
+
+The furniture and the remains of the cigar-box cover followed the knife
+into her blouse and she opened the book.  But before she had begun to
+read there was a sleepy little call from below.
+
+"Yes, baby!" called the child.  "Here's Lydia, up in the tree!  Watch
+me, dearie!  See me come down.  Here comes Florence Dombey first."
+
+With some difficulty the book followed the knife and the furniture into
+the blouse.  Florence Dombey, being hastily inverted, showed a length
+of light martin cord wrapped about her cotton legs.
+
+"Here she comes, baby!  Catch now for Lydia."
+
+The baby below, a tiny plump replica of Lydia, sat up with a gurgle of
+delight and held up her arms as Florence Dombey, dangling unhappily,
+upside down, on the end of the marlin cord, was lowered carefully into
+the perambulator.
+
+"And here I come.  Watch me, baby!"
+
+With a swing light and agile as a young monkey, Lydia let herself down,
+landing with a spring of which an acrobat might have boasted, beside
+the perambulator.
+
+"There, sweetness!"--kissing the baby--"first we'll fix Florence
+Dombey, then we'll start for home."
+
+"Florence, home wiv baby."
+
+"Yes, it's getting near supper time."  Lydia tucked the still
+hectically staring doll in beside her small sister, turned the
+perambulator around and ran it along one of the little paths to the
+sidewalk.  She hoisted it to the sidewalk with some puffing and several
+"darn its," then started toward the block of houses, north of the
+pasture.
+
+At the crossing she met a small girl of her own age, who carried a toy
+balloon, and a popcorn ball.
+
+"Hello, Lydia!" she cried.  "It was a perfectly lovely circus!"
+
+"Was it?" said Lydia, with an indifferent voice that something in her
+blue eyes denied.  "Well, I had to take care of little Patience!"
+
+"Huh!" shrilled the little girl, "old Lizzie would have done that!  I
+think your father's mean not to give you the money."
+
+Lydia's red cheeks went still redder.  "My father's got plenty of
+money," she began fiercely.  Here the baby interrupted.
+
+"Baby love pritty--Baby love--" she held out two beseeching dimpled
+hands toward the red balloon.
+
+"Patience, you can't have it," cried Lydia.  "It--it'll make your tummy
+ache.  I'll buy you one when you're older."
+
+The black-eyed child, holding the red balloon, suddenly kissed little
+Patience, who was the pet of all the children in the neighborhood, and
+put the string of her balloon into the dimpled hand.  "I had the
+circus--you can have the balloon," she said.
+
+Lydia jerked the string away and held it out to the owner.
+
+"We're no cheerity charities, Margery," she said.  "I'll get Patience a
+balloon."
+
+"You're an awful liar and a cruel beast, Lydia!" cried Margery.  She
+snatched the string and tied it about the baby's wrist.  "You know you
+can't buy her one and you know she'll cry herself sick for one, now
+she's seen mine, and I guess I love her as much as you do."
+
+Lydia looked from the cherub in the perambulator, crowing ecstatically
+over the red bubble that tugged at her wrist, to the defiant Margery.
+
+"I'll let her have it, Margery," she said reluctantly.  "I'll make you
+a doll's high chair."
+
+"All right," said Margery, nonchalantly.  "Face tag!  So long!"
+
+Lydia ran the perambulator along the board walk.  The street was
+macadamized and bordered with thrifty maple trees.  Back of the maple
+trees were frame houses, of cheap and stupid construction.  Before one
+of these Lydia paused.  It was a dingy brown house, of the type known
+as "story and a half."  There was a dormer window at the top and a bow
+window in the ground floor and a tiny entry porch at the front.
+
+Lydia opened the gate in the picket fence and tugged the perambulator
+through and up to the porch.
+
+"There, baby mine, shall Lydia take you in for your supper?"
+
+"Supper," cooed little Patience, lifting her arms.
+
+Lydia lifted her to the porch with surprising ease.  The little two
+year old should have been no light weight for the little mother of
+twelve.  She stood on the porch, watching Lydia arrange Florence Dombey
+in her place in the perambulator.  Her resemblance to Lydia was marked.
+The same dusty gold hair though lighter, the square little shoulders,
+and fine set of the head.  The red balloon tugging at her wrist, her
+soiled little white dress blowing in the summer breeze, she finally
+grew impatient of Lydia's attentions to Florence Dombey.
+
+"Baby eat now," she cried with a stamp of her small foot.
+
+Lydia laughed.  She ran up the steps, took the baby's hand and led her
+through the entry into a square little room, evidently the parlor of
+the home.  It was dusty and disorderly.  The center-table of fine old
+mahogany was littered with pipes and newspapers.  A patent rocker was
+doing duty as a clothes rack for hats and coats.  A mahogany desk was
+almost indistinguishable under a clutter of doll's furniture.  The
+sunset glow pouring through the window disclosed rolls of dust on the
+faded red Brussels carpet.
+
+Lydia disgorged the contents of her blouse upon the desk, then followed
+little Patience into the next room.  This was larger than the first and
+was evidently the dining-room and sitting-room.  A huge old mahogany
+table and sideboard, ill kept and dusty, filled the bow window end of
+the room.  Opposite the sideboard was a couch, draped with a red and
+green chenille spread.  The floor was covered with oil cloth.
+
+A short, stout old woman was setting the table.  She had iron gray
+hair.  Her face was a broad wreath of wrinkles, surrounding
+bespectacled black eyes and a thin mouth that never quite concealed a
+very white and handsome set of false teeth.
+
+"See!  Liz!  See!" cried little Patience, pattering up to the old woman
+with the tugging balloon.
+
+"Ain't that grand!" said Lizzie.  "Where'd you git the money, Lydia?
+Baby's milk's in the tin cup on the kitchen table.  Your father's home.
+You'd better fry the steak.  He complains so about it when I do it."
+
+Lydia left the baby clinging to Lizzie's skirts and went on into the
+kitchen.  Her father was washing his hands at the sink.
+
+"Hello, Dad!" she said.  The child had a peculiar thread of richness in
+her voice when she spoke to little Patience and it was apparent again
+as she greeted the man at the sink.  He turned toward her.
+
+"Well, young woman, it's about time you got home," he said.  "Baby all
+right?"
+
+Lydia nodded and turned toward the litter of dishes and paper parcels
+on the kitchen table.  Amos Dudley at this time was about forty years
+old,--a thin man of medium weight, his brown hair already gray at the
+temples.  Lydia evidently got from him the blue of her eyes and the
+white of her teeth.  He began to peel off a pair of brown overalls.
+
+"What's for supper?" he asked.
+
+"Round steak," said Lydia.
+
+"For heaven's sake, don't let Liz touch it."
+
+"I won't," said the child, piling up dishes deftly.  "I'm going to give
+baby her cup of milk, and then I'll fix it in my patent way."
+
+Amos nodded.  "You're a natural cook, like your mother."  He paused,
+one leg of his overalls off, disclosing his shiny black trousers.
+Lydia carried the cup of milk toward the dining-room.  From where he
+sat he could see her kneel before little Patience, and hold the cup,
+while the baby drank thirstily.  Little motes of the sunset light
+danced on the two curly golden heads.  He looked from the children
+toward the dusty kitchen table.
+
+"What a hell of a mess Liz does keep going," he muttered.  "Patience
+would break her heart, if she knew.  Oh!  Patience, Patience!--"
+
+Lydia came back with the empty cup.  "Now for the steak," she
+exclaimed.  "Gosh, what a fire--"
+
+She attacked the greasy stove with enthusiasm and in a short time a
+savory smell of steak filled the house.  Amos went into the dining-room
+and sat in a rocking chair with little Patience and the balloon in his
+lap.  Old Lizzie hummed as she finished setting the table and Lydia
+whistled as she seasoned the potatoes Lizzie had set to frying.
+
+"Where'd she get the balloon?" asked Amos as Lydia brought in the
+platter of meat.
+
+"Margery gave it to her," answered the child.  "Supper's ready."
+
+"Got it at the circus, I suppose.  I wish I could 'a' let you go,
+Lydia, but at a dollar and a half a day, I swan I--"
+
+"I didn't want to go," returned Lydia, sitting the baby in her high
+chair.  "I'm getting too big for circuses."
+
+"Too big for a circus!"  Her father looked at her with understanding
+eyes.  "I guess heaven is paved with lies like yours, Lydia.  John
+Levine will be over to-night.  Get some of the mess dug out of the
+parlor, will you, Lizzie?"
+
+"Sure," said Lizzie, good-naturedly.  Lydia sat opposite her father and
+poured tea.  The ancient maid of all work sat beside Patience and
+dispensed the currant sauce and the cake.
+
+The baby was half asleep before the meal was ended.  "She didn't finish
+her nap this afternoon," said Lydia.  "I'll take her up to bed now and
+finish my cake afterward."
+
+She tugged the baby out of the high chair that was becoming too close a
+fit and toiled with her up the narrow stairs that led from the entry.
+
+The little sisters slept together in a slant-ceilinged bedroom.  Here
+again was dust and disorder, the floor covered with clothing and toys,
+the bed unmade, the old fashioned mahogany bureau piled high with
+books, brushes, and soiled teacups that had held the baby's milk.
+
+There was still light enough to see by.  Lydia stood Patience on the
+bed and got her into her nightdress after gently persuading the baby to
+let her fasten the balloon to the foot of the bed.  Then she carried
+her to the little rocker by the window and with a look that was the
+very essence of motherhood began to rock the two year old to sleep.
+Presently there floated down to Amos, smoking his pipe on the front
+step, Lydia's childish, throaty contralto:
+
+  "I've reached the land of corn and wine
+  With all its riches surely mine,
+  I've reached that beauteous shining shore,
+  My heaven, my home, for ever more."
+
+A little pause, during which crickets shrilled, then, in a softer voice:
+
+  "Blow him again to me
+  While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps."
+
+Another pause--and still more softly:
+
+  "Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet;
+  Make it from simple flowers
+  Plucked from the lowly valley
+  After the summer showers."
+
+The coolness of the August wind touched Amos' face, "Oh!  Patience,
+Patience--" he murmured.
+
+Lydia sat for a moment or two with the sleeping baby in her arms,
+looking down on her with a curious gentle intentness.  Then she rose
+carefully, and as carefully deposited little Patience on the bed.  This
+done, she untied the balloon and carried it out with her to the little
+landing.  There was a window here into which the August moon was
+beginning to shine.  Lydia sat down with the balloon and felt of it
+carefully.
+
+"Aren't balloons the most wonderful things, almost as wonderful as
+bubbles," she murmured.  "I love the smell of them.  Think what they
+can do, how they can float, better than birds!  How you want to squeeze
+them but you don't dast!  I'd rather have gone to the circus than to
+heaven."
+
+In a moment she heard steps and greetings and her father leading his
+friend into the house.  Then she slipped down the stairs and into the
+night.  A dozen times she ran up and down the yard, the balloon like a
+fettered bird tugging at her wrist.
+
+"I love it as much as little Patience does," she murmured.  "Oh, I wish
+it was mine."
+
+Finally, she ran out of the gate and up the street to the one fine
+house of which the street boasted.  She stole up to the door and
+fastened the string of the balloon to the door bell, gave the bell a
+jerk and fled.
+
+As she ran down the street, a boy, leaning against the gate-post next
+her own, cried, "What's the rush, Lydia?"
+
+"Oh, hello, Kent!  Did you like the circus?"
+
+"The best ever!  You should have taken that ticket I wanted you to.
+Didn't cost me anything but carrying water to the elephants."
+
+"I can't take anything I don't pay for.  I promised mother.  You know
+how it is, Kent."
+
+"I guess your mother fixed it so you'd miss lots of good times, all
+right----  Now, don't fly off the handle--look, I got a trick.  I've
+rubbed my baseball with match heads, so's I can play catch at night.
+Try it?"
+
+"Gosh, isn't that wonderful!" exclaimed Lydia.  The boy, who was a
+little taller than Lydia, led the way to the open space between his
+home and Lydia's.  Then he spun Lydia a brisk ball.
+
+"It's like a shooting star," she cried, spinning back a quick overhand
+shot, "but it makes your hands smell like anything."
+
+"Lydia," called her father from the bow window, "it's time to come in."
+
+"All right!"  Then aside to Kent, "I'll wait till he calls me twice
+more, Kent.  Keep them coming."
+
+"Lydia!"
+
+"Yes, Dad.  Not so hard, Kent.  Don't throw curves, just because I
+can't."
+
+"Lydia!  I shan't call again."
+
+"Coming, Dad!  Good night, Kent.  Face tag!"
+
+"Face tag yourself, smarty.  Maybe I'll be over, to-morrow, if I ain't
+got anything better to do."
+
+Lydia sauntered slowly up to the kitchen steps.  "Well, I haven't
+anything pleasant at all to look forward to now," she thought.  "The
+circus parade is over and I've returned the balloon.  Gee, yes, there
+is too!  I didn't eat my cake yet!"
+
+She turned up the lamp in the kitchen and foraged in the cake box,
+bringing out the cake Lizzie had saved for her.  With this in her hand
+she entered the dining-room.  An extraordinarily long, thin man was
+stretched out in one arm chair, Amos in the other.
+
+"You ought to sit in the parlor, Dad," said Lydia, reproachfully.
+
+"It's too stuffy," said Amos.
+
+"Oh, hello, young Lydia!" said the tall man.  "Come here and let me
+look at you."
+
+Levine drew the child to his knee.  She looked with a clear
+affectionate gaze on his thin smooth-shaven face, and into his tired
+black eyes.
+
+"Why do you always say 'young' Lydia?" asked the child.
+
+"That's what I want to know, too," agreed Amos.
+
+"Because, by heck! she's so young to be such an old lady."  He smoothed
+the short curly hair with a gesture that was indescribably gentle.  "I
+tell you what, young Lydia, if you were ten years older and I were ten
+years younger--"
+
+Lydia leaned against his knee and took a large bite of cake.  "You'd
+take me traveling, wouldn't you, Mr. Levine?" she said, comfortably.
+
+"You bet I would, and you should have your heart's desire, whatever
+that might be.  If any one deserves it you do, young Lydia."
+
+Amos nodded and Lydia looked at them both with a sort of puzzled
+content as she munched her cake.
+
+"I brought a newly illustrated copy of 'Tom Sawyer' for you to see,
+Lydia," said Levine.  "Keep it as long as you want to.  It's over on
+the couch there."
+
+Lydia threw herself headlong on the book and the two men returned to
+the conversation she had interrupted.
+
+"My loan from Marshall comes due in January," said Amos.  "My lord,
+I've got to do something."
+
+"What made you get so much?" asked Levine.
+
+"A thousand dollars?  I told you at the time, I sorta lumped all my
+outstanding debts with the doctor's bill and funeral expenses and
+borrowed enough to cover."
+
+"He's a skin, Marshall is.  Why does he live on this street except to
+save money?"
+
+Lydia looked up from "Tom Sawyer."  There were two little lines of
+worry between her eyes and the little sick sense in the pit of her
+stomach that always came when she heard money matters discussed.  Her
+earliest recollection was of her mother frantically striving to devise
+some method of meeting their latest loan.
+
+"I'd like to get enough ahead to buy a little farm.  All my folks were
+farmers back in New Hampshire and I was a fool ever to have quit it.
+It looked like a mechanic could eat a farmer up, though, when I was a
+young fellow.  Now a little farm looks good enough to me.  But on a
+dollar and a half a day, I swan--"  Amos sighed.
+
+"Land's high around here," said Levine.  "I understand Marshall sold
+Eagle Farm for a hundred dollars an acre.  Takes a sharp farmer to make
+interest on a hundred an acre.  Lord--when you think of the land on the
+reservation twenty miles from here, just yelling for men to farm it and
+nothing but a bunch of dirty Indians to take advantage of it."
+
+"Look here, John," said Amos with sudden energy.  "It's time that bunch
+of Indians moved on and gave white men a chance.  I wouldn't say a word
+if they farmed the land, but such a lazy, lousy outfit!"
+
+"There are more than you feel that way, Amos," replied Levine.  "But it
+would take an Act of Congress to do anything."
+
+"Well, why not an Act of Congress, then?  What's that bunch we sent
+down to Washington doing?"
+
+"Poor brutes of Indians," said John Levine, refilling his pipe.  "I get
+ugly about the reservation, yet I realize they've got first right to
+the land."
+
+"The man that can make best use of the land's got first right to it,"
+insisted Amos.  "That's what my ancestors believed two hundred and
+fifty years ago when they settled in New Hampshire and put loopholes
+under the eaves of their houses.  Our farmhouse had loopholes like
+that.  Snow used to sift in through 'em on my bed when I was a kid."
+
+Lydia, lying on her stomach on the couch, turning the leaves of "Tom
+Sawyer," looked up with sudden interest.
+
+"Daddy, let's go back there to live.  I'd love to live in a house with
+loopholes."
+
+The two men laughed.  "You should have been a boy, Lydia," said Amos.
+
+"A boy," sniffed Levine, "and who'd have mothered little Patience if
+she'd been a boy?"
+
+"That's right--yet, look at that litter on the desk in the parlor."
+
+Both the men smiled while Lydia blushed.
+
+"What are you going to do with that doll furniture, Lydia?" asked John
+Levine.
+
+"I'm going to make a doll house for little Patience, for Christmas."
+Lydia gave an uncomfortable wriggle.  "Don't talk about me so much."
+
+"You're working a long way ahead," commented Amos.  "That was your
+mother's trait.  I wish I'd had it.  Though how I could look ahead on a
+dollar and a half a day--Lydia, it's bedtime."
+
+Lydia rose reluctantly, her book under her arm.
+
+"Don't read upstairs, child," Amos went on; "go to bed and to sleep,
+directly."
+
+Lydia looked around for a safe place for the book and finally climbed
+up on a chair and laid it on the top shelf of the sideboard.  Then she
+came back to her father's side and lifted her face for her good night
+kiss.
+
+"Good night, my child," said Amos.
+
+"How about me," asked Levine.  "Haven't you one to spare for a lonely
+bachelor?"
+
+He pulled Lydia to him and kissed her gently on the cheek.  "If you
+were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"
+
+"Then we'd travel," said the child, with a happy giggle as she ran out
+of the room.
+
+There was silence for a moment, then John Levine said, "Too bad old
+Lizzie is such a slob."
+
+"I know it," replied Amos, "but she gets no wages, just stayed on after
+nursing my wife.  I can't afford to pay for decent help.  And after
+all, she does the rough work, and she's honest and fond of the
+children."
+
+"Still Lydia ought to have a better chance.  I wish you'd let me--" he
+hesitated.
+
+"Let you what?" asked Amos.
+
+"Nothing.  She'd better work out things her own way.  She'll be getting
+to notice things around the house as she grows older."
+
+"It is the devil's own mess here," admitted Amos.  "I'm going to move
+next month.  This place has got on my nerves."
+
+"No, Daddy, no!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Both men started as the little girl appeared in the kitchen door.  "I
+came down to put Florence Dombey to bed," she explained.  "Oh, Daddy,
+don't let's move again!  Why, we've only been here two years."
+
+"I've got to get into a place where I can have a garden," insisted
+Amos.  "If we go further out of town we can get more land for less
+rent."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to move," wailed Lydia.  "Seems to me we've always
+been moving.  Last time you said 'twas because you couldn't bear to
+stay in the house where mother died.  I don't see what excuse you've
+got this time."
+
+"Lydia, go to bed!" cried Amos.
+
+Lydia retreated hastily into the kitchen and in a moment they heard her
+footsteps on the back stairs.
+
+"It's a good idea to have a garden," said John Levine.  "I tell you,
+take that cottage of mine out near the lake.  I'll let you have it for
+what you pay for this.  It'll be empty the first of September."
+
+"I'll go you," said Amos.  "It's as pretty a place as I know of."
+
+Again silence fell.  Then Amos said, "John, why don't you go to
+Congress?  Not to-day, or to-morrow, but maybe four or five years from
+now."
+
+Levine looked at Amos curiously.  The two men were about the same age.
+Levine's brown face had a foreign look about it, the gift of a Canadian
+French grandfather.  Amos was typically Yankee, with the slightly
+aquiline nose, the high forehead and the thin hair, usually associated
+with portraits of Daniel Webster.
+
+"Nice question for one poor man to put to another," said Levine, with a
+short laugh.
+
+"No reason you should always be poor," replied Amos.  "There's rich
+land lying twenty miles north of here, owned by nothing but Indians."
+
+Levine scratched his head.
+
+"You could run for sheriff," said Amos, "as a starter.  You're an Elk."
+
+"By heck!" exploded John Levine.  "I'll try for it.  No reason why a
+real estate man shouldn't go into politics as well as some of the
+shyster lawyers you and I know, huh, Amos?"
+
+Upstairs, Lydia stood in a path of moonlight pulling off her clothes
+slowly and stifling her sobs for the sake of the little figure in the
+bed.  Having jerked herself into her nightdress, she knelt by the
+bedside.
+
+"O God," she prayed in a whisper, "don't let there be any more deaths
+in our family and help me to bring little Patience up right."  This was
+her regular formula.  To-night she added a plea and a threat.  "And O
+God, don't let us move again.  Seems though I can't stand being jerked
+around so much.  If you do, God, I don't know what I'll say to
+you--Amen."
+
+Softly as a shadow she crept in beside her baby sister and the
+moonlight slowly edged across the room and rested for a long time on
+the two curly heads, motionless in childhood's slumber.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE HEROIC DAY
+
+
+"Where the roots strike deepest, the fruitage is best."--_The Murmuring
+Pine_.
+
+
+Little Patience had forgotten the red balloon, overnight.  Lydia had
+known that she would.  Nevertheless, with the feeling that something
+was owing to the baby, she decided to turn this Saturday into an extra
+season of delight for her little charge.
+
+"Do you care, Dad," asked Lydia, at breakfast, "if baby and I have
+lunch over at the lake shore?"
+
+"Not if you're careful," answered Amos.  "By the way," he added, "that
+cottage of John Levine's is right on the shore."  He spoke with studied
+carelessness.  Lydia had a passion for the water.
+
+She stared at him now, with the curiously pellucid gaze that belongs to
+some blue eyed children and Amos had a vague sense of discomfort, as if
+somehow, he were not playing the game quite fairly.  He dug into his
+coat pocket and brought up a handful of tobacco from which he
+disinterred two pennies.
+
+"Here," he said, "one for each of you.  Don't be late for supper,
+chickens."
+
+He kissed the two children, picked up his dinner pail and was off.
+Lydia, her red cheeks redder than usual, smiled at Lizzie, as she
+dropped the pennies into the pocket of her blouse and stuffed a gray
+and frowsy little handkerchief on top of them.
+
+"Isn't he the best old Daddy!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Sure," said Lizzie absentmindedly, as she poured out her third cup of
+coffee.  "Lydia, that dress of yours is real dirty.  You get into
+something else and I'll wash it out to-day."
+
+"I haven't got much of anything else to get into, have I,
+Lizzie?--except my Sunday dress."
+
+"You are dreadful short of clothes, child, what with the way you grow
+and the way you climb trees.  I'm trying to save enough out of the
+grocery money to get you a couple more of them galatea dresses for when
+school opens, but land--your poor mother was such a hand with the
+needle, you used to look a perfect picture.  There," warned by the
+sudden droop of Lydia's mouth, "I tell you, you'll be in and out of the
+water all day, anyhow.  Both of you get into the bathing suits your
+Aunt Emily sent you.  They're wool and it's going to be a dreadful hot
+day."
+
+"Jefful hot day," said little Patience, gulping the last of her oatmeal.
+
+"All right," answered Lydia, soberly.  "Wouldn't you think Aunt Emily
+would have had more sense than to send all those grown up clothes?  Who
+did she think's going to make 'em over, now?"
+
+"I don't know, child.  The poor thing is dead now, anyhow.  Folks is
+always thoughtless about charity.  Why I wasn't taught to sew, I don't
+know.  Anyhow, the bathing suits she got special for you two."
+
+"You bet your life, I'm going to learn how to sew," said Lydia, rising
+to untie the baby's bib.  "I'm practising on Florence Dombey.  Mother
+had taught me straight seams and had just begun me on over and over,
+when--"
+
+"Over and over," repeated the baby, softly.
+
+Lizzie put out a plump, toil-scarred hand and drew Lydia to her.
+"There, dearie!  Think about other things.  What shall poor old Liz fix
+you for lunch?"
+
+The child rubbed her bright cheek against the old woman's faded one.
+"You are a solid comfort to me, Lizzie," she said with a sigh.  Then
+after a moment she exclaimed, eagerly, "Oh!  Lizzie, do you think we
+could have a deviled egg?  Is it too expensive?"
+
+"You shall have a deviled egg if I have to steal it.  But maybe you
+might dust up the parlor a bit while I get things ready."
+
+Lydia established little Patience on the dining-room floor with a linen
+picture book, brought in a broom and dustpan from the kitchen and began
+furiously to sweep the parlor.  When the dust cleared somewhat she
+emerged with the dustpan heaped with sweepings and the corners of the
+room still untouched.  She hung the coats and hats in the entry and
+rubbed off the top of the table with her winter Tam o' Shanter, from
+which the moths flew as she worked.  She gazed thoughtfully at the
+litter on the desk and decided against touching it.  Then with a sense
+of duty well done, she lifted little Patience and carried her up into
+the little bedroom.
+
+The bathing suits were pretty blue woolen things, and when the two
+presented themselves to Lizzie in the kitchen the old woman exclaimed,
+"Well, if ever I seen two fairies!"
+
+"A thin one and a fat one," chuckled Lydia.  "Push the baby carriage
+down over the steps for me, Lizzie, and I'll prepare for our long, hard
+voyage."
+
+Patience was established in her perambulator with her linen picture
+book.  Florence Dombey was settled at her feet, with "Men of Iron."
+The bits of cigar box and the knife packed in a pasteboard box were
+tied to one edge of the carriage.  Patience's milk, packed in a tin
+pail of ice, was laid on top of "Men of Iron."  The paper bag of lunch
+dangled from the handle-bar and Lydia announced the preparations
+complete.
+
+The way to the lake shore led under the maple trees for several blocks.
+Then the board walk turned abruptly to cross a marsh, high-grown now
+with ripening cat-tails.  Having safely crossed the marsh, the walk
+ended in a grass-grown path.  Lydia trundled the heavy perambulator
+with some difficulty along the path.  The August sun was hot.
+
+  "'A life on the ocean wave--'"
+
+she panted.  "You are getting fat, baby!
+
+  'A home on the rolling deep.
+  Where the scattered waters rave
+  And the winds their revels keep.'
+
+Darn it, I wish I had a bicycle!"
+
+"Ahoy there!  Hard aport with your helm, mate!" came a shout from
+behind her.  A boy in a bright red bathing suit jumped off a bicycle.
+
+"Hello, Kent!" said Lydia.
+
+"Hello, yourself!" returned Kent.  "Wait and I'll hitch to the front
+axle."
+
+He untied a stout cord from his handle-bars and proceeded to fasten it
+from his saddle post to the perambulator.  Lydia watched him with a
+glowing face.  She was devoted to Kent, although they quarreled a great
+deal.  He was a handsome boy, two years Lydia's senior; not tall for
+his years, but already broad and sturdy, with crinkly black hair and
+clear, black-lashed brown eyes.  His face was round and ruddy under its
+summer tan.  His lips were full and strong--an aggressive, jolly boy,
+with a quick temper and a generous heart.  He and Lydia had been
+friends since kindergarten days.
+
+"I'm going to stay in the Willows all day," said Lydia.  "Don't go too
+fast, Kent."
+
+"Dit-up!  Dit-up, horsy!" screamed little Patience.
+
+"Toot!  Toot!  Express for the Willows!" shouted Kent, mounting his
+wheel, and the procession was off, the perambulator bounding madly
+after the bicycle, while Patience shouted with delight and Lydia clung
+desperately to the handle-bars.
+
+The path, after a few moments, shifted to the lake shore.  The water
+there lapped quietly on a sandy beach, deep shaded by willows.  Kent
+dismounted.
+
+"Discharge your cargo!" he cried.
+
+"Don't be so bossy," said Lydia.  "This is my party."
+
+"All right, then I won't play with you."
+
+"Nobody asked you to, smarty.  I was going to give you my deviled egg
+for lunch."
+
+"Gosh," said Kent, "did you bring your lunch?  Say, I guess I'll go
+home and get mother to give me some.  But let's play pirates, first."
+
+"All right!  I choose to be chief first," agreed Lydia.
+
+"And I'm the cannibal and baby's the stolen princess," said Kent.
+
+The three children plunged into the game which is the common property
+of childhood.  For a time, bloody captures, savage orgies, escape,
+pursuit, looting of great ships and burial of treasure, transformed the
+quiet shore to a theater of high crime.  At last, as the August noon
+waxed high, and the hostage princess fell fast asleep in her
+perambulator cave, the cannibal, who had shifted to captured duke,
+bowed before the pirate.
+
+"Sir," he said in a deep voice, "I have bethought myself of still
+further treasure which if you will allow me to go after in my trusty
+boat, I will get and bring to you--if you will allow me to say farewell
+at that time to my wife and babes."
+
+"Ha!" returned the pirate.  "How do I know you'll come back?"
+
+The duke folded his arms.  "You have my word of honor which never has,
+and never will, be broken."
+
+"Go, duke--but return ere sundown."  The pirate made a magnificent
+gesture toward the bicycle, "and, say Kent, bring plenty to fill
+yourself up, for I'm awful hungry and I'll need all we've got."
+
+As Kent shot out of sight, Lydia turned to arrange the mosquito bar
+over little Patience, then she stood looking out over the lake.  The
+morning wind had died and the water lay as motionless and perfect a
+blue as the sky above.  Faint and far down the curving shore the white
+dome of the Capitol building rose above soft billows of green tree
+tops.  Up the shore, woods crowned the gentle slopes of the hills.
+Across the lake lay a dim green shore-line of fields.  Lydia gave a
+deep sigh.  The beauty of the lake shore always stirred in her a
+wordless ecstasy.  She waded slowly to her waist into the water, then
+turned gently on her back and floated with her eyes on the sky.  Its
+depth of color was no deeper nor more crystal clear than the depths of
+her own blue gaze.  The tender brooding wonder of the lake was a part
+and parcel of her own little face, so tiny in the wide expanse of water.
+
+After some moments of drifting, she turned on her side and began to
+swim along the shore.  She swam with a power and a precision of stroke
+that a man twice her size would have envied.  But it must be noted that
+she did not get out of eye and ear shot of the perambulator beneath the
+willows; and she had not been swimming long before a curious agitation
+of the mosquito netting brought her ashore.
+
+She wrung the water from her short skirt and was giving little Patience
+her bread and milk, when Kent returned with a paper bag.
+
+"Ma was cross at me for pestering her, but I managed to get some
+sandwiches and doughnuts.  Come on, let's begin.  Gee, there's a squaw!"
+
+Coming toward the three children seated in the sand by the perambulator
+was a thin bent old woman, leaning on a stick.
+
+"Dirty old beggar," said Kent, beginning to devour his sandwiches.
+
+"Isn't she awful!" exclaimed Lydia.  Begging Indians were no novelty to
+Lake City children, but this one was so old and thin that Lydia was
+horrified.  Toothless, her black hair streaked with gray, her calico
+dress unspeakably dirty, her hands like birds' claws clasping her
+stick, the squaw stopped in front of the children.
+
+"Eat!" she said, pointing to her mouth, while her sunken black eyes
+were fixed on Kent's sandwiches.
+
+Little Patience looked up and began to whimper with fear.
+
+"Get out, you old rip!" said Kent.
+
+"Eat!  Eat!" insisted the squaw, a certain ferocity in her manner.
+
+"Did you walk clear in from the reservation?" asked Lydia.
+
+The squaw nodded, and held out her scrawny hand for the children's
+inspection.  "No eats, all time no eats!  You give eats--poor old
+woman."
+
+"Oh, Kent, she's half starved!  Let's give her some of our lunch,"
+exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"Not on your life," returned Kent.  "Dirty, lazy lot!  Why don't they
+work?"
+
+"If we'd go halves, we'd have enough," insisted Lydia.
+
+"You told me you'd only enough for yourself.  Get out of here, you old
+she-devil."
+
+The squaw did not so much as glance at Kent.  Her eyes were fastened on
+Lydia, with the look of a hungry, expectant dog.  Lydia ran her fingers
+through her damp curls, and sighed.  Then she gave little Patience her
+share of the bread and butter and a cooky.  She laid the precious
+deviled egg in its twist of paper on top of the remainder of the bread
+and cookies and handed them to the Indian.
+
+"You can't have any of mine, if you give yours up!" warned Kent.
+
+"I don't want any, pig!" returned Lydia.
+
+The old squaw received the food with trembling fingers and broke into
+sobs, that tore at her old throat painfully.  She said something to
+Lydia in Indian, and then to the children's surprise, she bundled the
+food up in her skirt and started as rapidly as possible back in the
+direction whence she had come.
+
+"She's taking it back to some one," said Kent.
+
+"Poor thing," said Lydia.
+
+"Poor thing!" sniffed Kent.  "It would be a good thing if they were all
+dead.  My father says so."
+
+"Well, I guess your father don't know everything," snapped Lydia.
+
+"Evyfing," said Patience, who had finished her lunch and was digging in
+the sand.
+
+Kent paused in the beginning of his attack on his last sandwich to look
+Lydia over.  She was as thin as a half-grown chicken in her wet bathing
+suit.  Her damp curls, clinging to her head and her eyes a little heavy
+with heat and weariness after her morning of play, made her look
+scarcely older than Patience.  Kent wouldn't confess, even to himself,
+how fond he was of Lydia.
+
+"Here," he said gruffly.  "I can't eat this sandwich.  Mother made me
+too many.  And here's a doughnut."
+
+"Thanks, Kent," said Lydia meekly.  "What do you want to play, after
+lunch?"
+
+"Robinson  Crusoe,"  replied  Kent promptly.  "You'll have to be
+Friday."
+
+As recipient of his bounty, Lydia recognized Kent's advantage and
+conceded the point without protest.
+
+She held Patience's abbreviated bathing suit skirt with one hand.
+"Where are you heading for, baby?" she asked.
+
+"Mardy!  Mardy!" screamed Patience, tugging at her leash.
+
+"Oh, rats, it's Margery Marshall.  Look at the duds on her.  She makes
+me sick," groaned Kent.
+
+"She's crazy about little Patience," answered Lydia, "so I put up with
+a lot from her."
+
+She loosed her hold on Patience.  The baby trundled along the sand to
+meet the little girl in an immaculate white sailor suit, who approached
+pushing a doll buggy large enough to hold Patience.  She ran to meet
+the baby and kissed her, then allowed her to help push the doll
+carriage.
+
+"Mardy tum!  Mardy tum!" chanted Patience.
+
+Margery's black hair was in a long braid, tied with a wide white
+ribbon.  Margery's hands were clean and so were her white stockings and
+shoes.  She brought the doll's carriage to pause before Lydia and Kent
+and gazed at them appraisingly out of bright black eyes--beautiful
+eyes, large and heavily lashed.  Kent's face was dirty and sweat
+streaked.  His red bathing suit was gray with sand and green with grass
+stain.  On his head he wore his favorite headgear, a disreputable white
+cotton cap with the words "Goldenrod Flour Mills" across the front.
+
+"Well," he said belligerently, to Margery, "do you see anything green?"
+
+Margery shrugged her shoulders.  "Watcha playing?"
+
+"Nothing!  Want to play it?" replied Lydia.
+
+"Thanks," answered Margery.  "I'll watch you two while I sit with the
+baby.  Isn't she just ducky in that bathing suit?"
+
+Lydia melted visibly and showed a flash of white teeth.  "You bet!
+How's Gwendolyn?" nodding toward the great bisque doll seated in the
+wonderful doll carriage.  "I wish I had a doll like that."
+
+"She isn't in it with Florence Dombey," said Kent.  "Florence is some
+old sport, she is.  Guess I'd better cut her down."
+
+It was remarkable that while on most occasions Lydia was the tenderest
+of mothers to Florence Dombey, she was, when the fever of "play and
+pretend" was on her, capable of the most astonishing cruelties.  During
+the game of pirates, Florence Dombey had been hung from a willow
+branch, in lieu of a yardarm, and had remained dangling there in the
+wind, forgotten by her mother.
+
+Kent placed her in Patience's carriage.  "I'll tell you what I'll do,"
+he said.  "I'll go up the shore and get Smith's flat boat.  We'll
+anchor it out from the shore, and that'll be the wreck.  We'll swim out
+to her and bring stuff in.  And up under the bank there we'll build the
+cave and the barricade."
+
+"Gee," exclaimed Lydia, "that's the best we've thought of yet.  I'll be
+collecting stuff to put in the wreck."
+
+All during the golden August afternoon the game waxed joyfully.  For a
+long time, Margery sat aloof, playing with the baby.  But when the
+excavating of the cave began, she succumbed, and began to grovel in the
+sand with the other two.  She was allowed to come in as Friday's
+father, and baby Patience, panting at her work of scratching the sand
+with a crooked stick, was entered as the Parrot.  Constant small
+avalanches of sand and soil from the bank powdered the children's hair
+and clothes with gray-black dust.
+
+"Gosh, this is too much like work," groaned Kent, at last.  "I'll tell
+you, let's play the finding of Friday's father."
+
+"I don't want to be tied up in a boat," protested, Margery, at once.
+
+"Mardy not in boat," chorused little Patience, toddling to the water's
+edge and throwing in a handful of sand.
+
+"Isn't she a love!" sighed Margery.
+
+"Huh, you girls make me sick," snorted Kent.  "We won't tie you in the
+boat.  We'll bring the boat in and get you, then we'll anchor it out
+where it is now, and--and--I'll go get Smith's rowboat, and Friday and
+I'll come out and rescue you."
+
+Margery hesitated.  "Aw, come on!" urged Kent.  "Don't be such a 'fraid
+cat.  That's why us kids don't like you, you're such a silly,
+dressed-up doll."
+
+The banker's daughter flushed.  Though she loved the pretty clothes and
+though the sense of superiority to other children, carefully cultivated
+by her mother, was the very breath of her nostrils, she had never been
+quite so happy as this afternoon when grubbing on an equality with
+these three inferior children.
+
+"I'm not afraid at all and I'm just as dirty as Lydia is.  Go ahead
+with your old boat."
+
+They tethered Patience with Kent's cord to one of the willow trees and
+Margery was paddled out several boat lengths from the shore and the
+great stone that served for anchor was dropped over.  Kent took a clean
+dive overboard, swam ashore and disappeared along the willow path.
+Little Patience set up a wail.
+
+"Baby turn too.  Baby turn, too," she wept.
+
+"I'll go stay with her till Kent comes," said Lydia, diving into the
+water as casually as if she were rising from a chair.
+
+"I won't stay in this awful boat alone!" shrieked Margery.
+
+Lydia swam steadily to the shore, then turned.  Margery was standing up
+in the boat.
+
+"Sit down!  Sit down!" cried Lydia.
+
+Margery, beside herself with fear, tossed her arms, "I won't stay in
+this old--"
+
+There was a great splash and a choking cry as Margery's black braid
+disappeared beneath the water.
+
+"And she can't swim," gasped Lydia.  "Kent!" she screamed, and made a
+flying leap into the water.  Her slender, childish arms seemed suddenly
+steel.  Her thin little legs took a racing stroke like tiny propellers.
+Margery came up on the far side of the boat and uttered another choking
+cry before she went down again.  Lydia dived, caught the long black
+braid and brought the frenzied little face to the surface.  Margery
+immediately threw an arm around Lydia's neck, and Lydia hit her in the
+face with a clenched small fist and all the strength she could muster.
+
+"Let go, or I'll let you drown.  Turn over on your back.  There isn't a
+thing to be afraid of."
+
+Margery, with a sob, obeyed and Lydia towed her the short distance to
+the boat.  "There, catch hold," she said.
+
+Both the children clung to the gunwale, Margery choking and sobbing.
+
+"I can't lift you into the boat," panted Lydia.  "But quit your crying.
+You're safe.  There's Kent."
+
+The whole episode had taken but a few minutes.  Kent had heard the call
+and some note of need in it registered, after a moment, in his mind.
+He ran back and leaped into the water.
+
+He clambered into the flat boat and reaching over pulled Margery bodily
+over the gunwale.  The child, sick and hysterical, huddled into the
+bottom of the boat.
+
+"Are you all right, Lyd?" he asked.
+
+"Sure," replied Lydia, who was beginning to recover her breath.
+
+It was the work of a minute to ground the boat.  Then unheeding little
+Patience's lamentations, the two children looked at each other and at
+Margery.
+
+"I'll run for her mother," said Kent.
+
+"And scare her to death!  She isn't hurt a bit," insisted Lydia.
+"Margery, stop crying.  You're all right, I tell you."
+
+"I'll tell you," said Kent, "let's put her in Patience's carriage, and
+carry her home.  The water she swallowed makes her awful sick at her
+stomach, I guess."
+
+The fright over, the old spirit of adventure, with an added sense of
+heroism, animated Kent and Lydia.
+
+Margery was teased out of the boat and assisted into the perambulator,
+with her dripping white legs dangling helplessly over the end.  Little
+Patience's tears were assuaged when she was placed in the doll buggy,
+with Margery's doll in her arms.  Florence Dombey was tied papoose
+fashion to Lydia's back.  The bicycle was hidden in the cave and with
+Kent wheeling Margery and Lydia, Patience, the procession started
+wildly for home.
+
+By the time they had turned into the home street, Margery was beginning
+to recover, but she was still shivering and inclined to sob.  Other
+children followed them and it was quite an imposing group that turned
+in at the Marshall gate, just as Mrs. Marshall came to the door to bid
+a guest good-by.
+
+The scene that followed was difficult for either Lydia or Kent to
+describe afterward.  There was a hullabaloo that brought half the
+mothers of the neighborhood into the yard.  The doctor was sent for.
+Margery was put to bed and Kent and Lydia were mentioned as murderers,
+low-down brats and coarse little brutes by Mrs. Marshall, who ended by
+threatening them with the police.
+
+Old Lizzie appeared on the scene in time to take Lydia's part and Kent
+disappeared after Mrs. Marshall had told him that Margery's father
+would be around to see his father that evening.
+
+"Is the child dead?" demanded old Lizzie, holding Patience on one arm
+while Lydia clung to the other.
+
+"She was able to walk upstairs," said a neighbor.  "It's just Mrs.
+Marshall's way, you know."
+
+"I'll way her," snorted Lizzie.  "Fine thanks to Lydia for saving the
+child.  Come home with your old Liz, dearie, and get into the nice
+clean dress I've got for you."
+
+Lydia told the story to Amos at suppertime.  He was much disturbed.
+
+"I've told you often and often, Lydia, never to endanger a child that
+can't swim.  You and Kent should have had more sense."
+
+The quick tears sprang to the child's eyes.  She was still much shaken.
+
+"Is this lesson enough for you, or must I forbid your playing in the
+water?  I thought I could trust you absolutely."
+
+"Stop your scolding her, Amos Dudley," exclaimed old Lizzie.  "I won't
+have it.  She's too nervous a child."
+
+Amos was saved a reply by a ring at the doorbell.  Lizzie let Margery's
+father in.  He was a short, red-faced man with black hair and eyes.  He
+was too much excited now to stand on ceremony, and he followed Lizzie
+into the dining-room.
+
+"This won't do, Dudley.  These wild young ones of yours--"
+
+"Wait a minute, Marshall," interrupted Amos, with a dignity that he had
+brought with him from New England.  "Margery is all right, so we can go
+over this thing calmly.  Sit down and listen to Lydia's story.  Tell
+him, Lydia."
+
+Lydia left her place and crowded up against her father's side.  Old
+Lizzie was holding the baby.
+
+"It was like this," Lydia began.  "Baby and me were going to play by
+ourselves under the willows.  Then Kent, he came and he played pirates
+with us."
+
+"Why wasn't Kent out playing with the boys?" interrupted Marshall.
+
+Lydia's eyes widened.  "Why, I'm as good as a boy to play with, any
+day!  Mostly he does play with other boys, but when they aren't round,
+he and I play pirates.  And then, right after we'd had our lunch,
+Margery she came along and Kent and I were mad--"
+
+The child paused uncomfortably and rubbed her curly yellow head with
+her thin little hand in an embarrassed way.
+
+"Why were you mad, Lydia?"  In spite of himself, Marshall's voice was
+softening, as Amos had known it would.  Lydia made a deep appeal
+somehow to the tenderness of men.
+
+"Tell Mr. Marshall all you told me, Lydia," said Amos.
+
+"Well--well, you see, it's like this.  Margery's always so _clean_ and
+she has lovely clothes and--and she--she looks down on us other kids so
+we won't generally let her play with us--and she's an awful 'fraid cat
+and--and a tattle-tale.  But when we got to playing Robinson Crusoe,
+and were digging the cave she helped and got terrible dirty, just like
+us, and then she wanted to be Friday's father, and then--well--now--I
+guess the rest of it was Kent's and my fault.  We forgot she couldn't
+swim and we forgot what a cry-baby she was.  'Cause you see, water's
+almost like land to Kent and me and we'd been swimming 'most all day,
+and Margery's the only kid around here that can't swim."
+
+"Why can't she swim?" demanded Marshall.  "How'd all the rest of you
+learn?  Don't you think you were mean not to let her learn?"
+
+Again Lydia's pellucid eyes widened.  "Why her mother won't let her
+play with common kids like us!  And us kids never learned.  We've just
+played in the water ever since we was as big as baby.  She'll be
+swimming by the time she's five," added Lydia, looking at the sleeping
+Patience and speaking with the curious note of richness in her voice.
+
+David Marshall scowled and stirred uncomfortably.  He did not look at
+Amos, who sat with his arm about Lydia, his thin face a lesser replica
+of the old engraving of Daniel Webster hanging on the wall above.
+
+"Well, go on!  How'd she come to fall overboard?"
+
+"She and I was sitting in the boat, and baby, she was tied to a tree by
+a long string and she began to cry to come too, and I jumped over to go
+quiet her.  Kent he'd gone to get another boat.  And Margery she jumped
+up and began to yell and wave her arms and fell overboard.  Then I
+remembered she couldn't swim and I went back and got her and Kent came
+and pulled us in shore.  It wasn't anything, but Margery's such a
+cry-baby.  Lizzie, she's terrible uncomfortable."
+
+Lydia's attention had returned to little Patience.  "I'll take her up
+to bed," she said, "it won't take but a few minutes."
+
+"I'll carry her," said Lizzie.
+
+The baby opened her eyes.  "No, no one cally but Lyd."
+
+"Let Daddy carry you," begged Amos.
+
+Patience's little voice rose to a wail.  "No one cally but Lyd."
+
+"You don't have to be so polite," sniffed Lydia, "I carry her all the
+time."
+
+She lifted the sleepy baby easily and Patience dropped her soft cheek
+against Lydia's and closed her eyes again.  Lydia turned to Marshall.
+Her face was very serious.
+
+"I know I was awful bad, Mr. Marshall, and maybe you feel as if you
+ought to lick me."
+
+"Put your little sister to bed," said Marshall gravely, "and then we'll
+see."
+
+There was silence in the room for a moment after Lydia left it, then
+Amos said, "I'll be glad to do anything I can, Marshall."
+
+"Neither of you'll lay a finger on Lydia," interrupted Lizzie.  "If you
+want to lick any one, go lick Elviry Marshall, the fool!  Why, I knew
+her when she was my niece's hired girl and you, Dave Marshall, was
+selling cans of tomatoes over a counter.  And she's bringing that young
+one up to be a silly little fool.  Mark my words, she'll be the prey of
+the first fortune-hunter that comes along."
+
+To Amos's surprise, Marshall only scowled at Lizzie, who now began to
+remove the supper dishes, talking in a whisper to herself.  She paused
+once in front of Marshall with the teapot in one hand and the milk
+pitcher in the other.
+
+"Coming and going with your nose in the air, Dave, I suppose you never
+notice Lydia, but you've had a good look at her to-night, and mind well
+what I mean when I say you know as well as I that children like Lydia
+are rare and that your young one ought to consider it a privilege to be
+pulled out of the water by her."
+
+Old Lizzie pounded out of the room and there was a clatter of dishes
+that ably expressed her frame of mind.  Above the clatter and down from
+the children's bedroom floated Lydia's little contralto lilt:
+
+  "Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet;
+  Make it from simple flowers
+  Plucked from the lowly valley
+  After the summer showers."
+
+Neither Amos nor his caller spoke.  In a few minutes Lydia's step
+sounded on the stairs.  The last of the sunset glow caught her hair,
+and the fine set of her head on her square little shoulders was never
+more pronounced than as she walked slowly toward Dave Marshall.
+
+"I never had a licking," she said, "but I guess I deserve one and so
+you'd better do it and get it done, Mr. Marshall."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE COTTAGE
+
+
+"The young pine knows the secrets of the ground.  The old pine knows
+the stars."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Marshall cleared his throat and reaching out, took Lydia by the arm and
+pulled her toward him.  He could feel her muscles stiffen under his
+touch.  The bright red color left her cheeks.
+
+"I wouldn't think much of your father, my child," he said, huskily, "if
+he let me whip you, even if I wanted to."
+
+Lydia took a quick look up into his face.  Then she gave a little
+gasping sigh, her lips quivered and she leaned against his knee.
+
+"Look here, Lydia," said Dave Marshall, "this is to be your punishment.
+I want you and Kent to teach Margery how to swim and how to get dirty,
+see?  Let her play with you 'common kids,' will you?"
+
+"Will her mother let her?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Yes," answered Dave, grimly.
+
+"All right," said Lydia, with a little sigh.
+
+"I know it'll be a hard job," Marshall interpreted the sigh quickly;
+"that's where the punishment comes in."
+
+"Lydia'll do it.  I'll see to it," said Amos.
+
+"You keep out, Dudley.  This is between Lydia and me.  How about it,
+Lydia?"
+
+"If you'll boss her mother, I'll boss Margery and Kent," said Lydia,
+with a sudden laugh.
+
+"It's a bargain."  Marshall rose.  "Good night, Dudley."
+
+"Good night, Marshall."
+
+Amos followed his caller to the door.  As he did so Lydia heard Kent's
+whistle in the back yard.  She joined him and the two withdrew to a
+bench behind the woodshed.
+
+"I saw him through the window," said Kent, in a low voice.  "What's he
+going to do to us?  Dad's licked me, so that much is done."
+
+Lydia told of their punishment.  "Darn it," groaned Kent, "I'd rather
+had another licking.  I certainly do hate that girl."
+
+"So do I," agreed Lydia.
+
+The two sat staring into the summer twilight.  "Anyhow," said Lydia, "I
+hit her an awful smack in the face to-day.  Of course, I had to, but
+that's why her nose bled so."
+
+"I wish you'd busted her old snoot," grumbled Kent.  "She's always
+turning it up at everybody.  We saved somebody's life to-day, by golly,
+and you'd think we'd committed a crime."
+
+Lydia sighed.  "Nothing to look forward to but worry now.  O gee, Kent,
+I've got two pennies!  One's Patience's.  But let's go spend the other
+at Spence's!"
+
+"Gum or all day sucker?" asked Kent, who, in spite of the fact that he
+owned a second-hand bicycle, was not above sharing a penny.
+
+"Gum lasts longer," suggested Lydia.
+
+"What kinda gum, spruce or white or tutti-frutti?"
+
+"You can choose."
+
+"Spruce then.  It makes the most juice.  Come on, Lyd, before you're
+called in."
+
+And thus ended the heroic day.
+
+No one ever knew what Dave Marshall said to Elviry, his wife, but a day
+or so after, little Margery, in a fine white flannel bathing suit,
+appeared on the sand, about a quarter of a mile below the Willows.
+Here any bright day from the last of June to the first week in
+September, a dozen children might be found at play in and out of the
+water.  There was usually a mother or an older sister somewhere about,
+but it was to be noted that Mrs. Marshall never appeared.  Margery came
+and went with Lydia.
+
+Kent was a quitter!  After the rescue he decided to eschew the society
+of girls forever and he struck a bargain with Lydia that she could have
+the use of his bicycle one day a week till snow came if she would
+undertake the disciplining of the banker's daughter alone.  For such a
+bribe Lydia would have undertaken to teach Elviry Marshall, herself, to
+swim--and so the bargain was struck.
+
+Margery, it was quickly discovered, sousing in the water with the other
+children was quite "a common kid" herself and though there seemed to be
+an inherent snobbishness in the little girl that returned to her as
+soon as she was dried and clothed, in her bathing suit she mucked about
+and screamed and quarreled as did the rest.
+
+Lydia's method of teaching was one employed by most of the children of
+Lake City when a new child moved into the town.  She forced Margery to
+float face downward in the water, again and again, while she counted
+ten.  After one afternoon of this, the banker's daughter had forever
+lost her fear of the water and the rest was easy.
+
+In spite of the relationship Dave Marshall had established between the
+two children, Margery and Lydia did not like each other.  One Saturday
+afternoon, after banking hours, Marshall was seated on his front porch,
+with Elviry and Margery, when Lydia appeared.  She stood on the steps
+in her bathing suit, her bare feet in a pair of ragged "sneakers."  Her
+face and hands and ankles were dirty but her eyes and the pink of her
+cheeks were clear.
+
+"Come on, Marg," said Lydia, "and, Mr. Marshall, please, won't you come
+too and see how well she does it?"
+
+"Run and get into your bathing suit, daughter," said Marshall.
+"Elviry, want to come?"
+
+"No," snapped Elviry.  "Lydia, how do you manage to get so dirty, when
+to my positive knowledge, you're in the water an hour every day?"
+
+Lydia blushed and tried to hide one ankle behind the other.  "I think
+you're terrible impolite," she murmured.
+
+Dave roared with laughter.  "Right you are, Lydia!  I guess I'll have
+to hitch up and drive us all over."
+
+They drove to the Willows and Margery went through her paces, while her
+father watched and applauded from the shore.  When they had finished
+and had run up and down to warm up and dry off and were driving home,
+Dave said,
+
+"You'd better come in to supper with us, Lydia."
+
+"No, thank you," answered the child.  "Mr. Levine's coming to supper at
+our house and I have to cook it."
+
+"Hum!  What does John Levine do at your house, so much?"
+
+"Oh, he's going into politics," answered Lydia, innocently, "and Dad
+advises him."
+
+"Well, tell them you've done a fine job as a swimming teacher," Dave
+spoke carelessly.  "I don't see why Levine wants to get into politics.
+He's doing well in real estate."
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Lydia, with a child's importance at having real news to
+impart, "he's going into politics so's to get some Indian land."
+
+"Like hell he is!" exclaimed Marshall.
+
+"Oh, Daddy!" Margery's voice was exactly like her mother's.
+
+They were turning into the Marshall driveway and Marshall's face was a
+curious mixture of amusement and irritation.  He kissed his little
+daughter when he lifted her from the buggy and bade her run to the
+house.  Before he lifted Lydia down he paused and as he stood on the
+ground and she sat in the surrey, she looked levelly into his black
+eyes.
+
+"I wish I had another little daughter like you, Lydia," he said.  "I
+don't see why--but God, you can't get swans from barnyard fowl."  He
+continued to study Lydia's face.  "Some day, my child, you'll make some
+man's heart break, or lift him up to heaven."
+
+Lydia squirmed.
+
+"Well, Margery's taught now," she said hastily, "so I don't have to be
+punished any more, do I?"
+
+Marshall scowled slightly.  "What do you mean?  Don't you want Margery
+to play with you?"
+
+"Oh, sure, she can play, if she wants to, but I mean I don't have to go
+get her and bring her into our games."
+
+"No," said Dave slowly, "but I think it would be nice of you to sort of
+keep an eye on her and get her dirty once in a while.  There!  Run
+home, child, you're shivering."
+
+With puzzled eyes, Lydia obeyed.
+
+The most important result, as far as Lydia was interested, of the talk
+between her father and Levine that night was that Amos decided
+definitely to move the following week.  Lydia cried a little over it,
+reproached God in her prayers and then with a child's resignation to
+the inevitability of grown up decision, she began to say good-by to the
+neighborhood children and to help old Lizzie to pack.
+
+Lydia did not see the new home until she rode out with the first
+dray-load of furniture.  She sat in the high seat beside the driver,
+baby Patience in her lap, her thin, long little legs dangling, her
+cheeks scarlet with excitement and the warmth of a hot September
+morning.  The cottage was a mile from the old home.  They drove along
+the maple shaded street for the first half of the distance, then turned
+into a dirt road that led toward the lake shore.  The dirt road emerged
+on the shore a half mile above the Willows and wound along a high
+embankment, crowned with oaks.
+
+"Whoa!" shouted the driver.
+
+"Oh, isn't it pretty!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+An old-fashioned white cottage, with green blinds and a tiny front
+porch, stood beside the road, its back to the lake.  There were five
+acres or so of ground around the house, set off by a white picket
+fence.  At the gate a pine tree stood.  There were oaks and lilac
+bushes in the front yard.  Through the leaves, Lydia saw the blue of
+the lake.
+
+"Our yard runs right down to the water!" she cried, as the driver
+lifted the baby down and she followed after.  "Gee!  I'm glad we moved!"
+
+"It is a nice little spot," said the driver, "but kinda lonely."  He
+set the perambulator inside the fence, then balanced the dining-room
+table on his head and started up the path to the door.
+
+Lydia looked along the road, where an occasional house was to be seen.
+
+"I hope kids live in those houses," she said, "but if they don't, baby
+and the lake are company enough for me, and Kent can come out on his
+wheel."
+
+She strapped Patience into the perambulator, then ran up to the house.
+The front door gave directly into a living-room of good proportions.
+Out of this folding doors led into a small dining-room and beyond this
+a kitchen of generous size with a wonderful view of the glimmering lake
+from its rear windows.  A comfortable-sized bedroom opened off each of
+these rooms.  Lydia ran through the little house eagerly.  It was full
+of windows and being all on one floor, gave a fine effect of
+spaciousness.  It was an old house but in excellent repair as was all
+John Levine's property.
+
+"I'm going to have the bedroom off the kitchen, 'cause you can see the
+lake from it," she told the driver.
+
+"It'll be colder'n charity in the winter.  Better take the middle one,"
+he remarked, setting the kitchen stove down with a bang.
+
+"No, old Lizzie'll want to have that.  Well, I'll begin to get things
+settled."
+
+Lizzie arrived on the third and final load.  She brought with her a
+lunch that they shared with the driver.  He good-naturedly set up the
+kitchen stove and the three beds for them and departed with the hope
+that they would not be too lonesome.
+
+Lydia and old Lizzie put in an afternoon of gigantic effort.  By six
+o'clock, the beds were made, dishes unpacked and in the china closet,
+the table was set for supper and an Irish stew of Lydia's make was
+simmering on the stove.
+
+When Amos came up the path at a half after six, his dinner pail in his
+hand, he found Lydia flat on her back on the little front porch.  Her
+curly head was wet with perspiration; face, hands and blouse were
+black.  The baby sat beside her, trying to get Florence Dombey to sleep.
+
+"Well," said Amos, looking down on his family, "how do you like it,
+Lydia?"
+
+"It's great!  My back's broken!  Supper's ready."
+
+"You shouldn't lift heavy things, child!  How often have I told you?
+Wait until I get home."
+
+"I want to get things done," replied Lydia, "so's I can do a little
+playing before school opens.  Come on in and see all we've done, Daddy."
+
+She forget her aching back and led the way into the house.  Amos was as
+excited and pleased as the children and Lizzie, so tired that her old
+hands shook, was as elated as the others.
+
+"It's much more roomy than the old house and all on one floor.  'Twill
+save me the stairs.  And the garden'll be fine," she said, failing to
+call attention to the fact that the water was far from the house and
+that there was no kitchen sink.
+
+"We've got to try to keep this place cleaner than we did the other,"
+said Amos.  "Lydia, better wash up for supper."
+
+"Oh, Daddy," said Lydia, "I'm too tired!  Don't make me!"
+
+"All right," answered Amos, "but your mother was always clean and so am
+I.  I don't see where you get it."
+
+"Maybe one of my ancestors was a garbage man," suggested Lydia, sliding
+into her place at the table.
+
+She allowed Lizzie to carry Patience into their bedroom after supper
+and Amos, smoking in the yard and planning the garden for next year,
+waited in vain to hear "Beulah Land" and "Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet"
+float to him from the open window.
+
+"Where's Lydia, Lizzie?" he asked as the old lady came out to empty the
+dish water.
+
+"She ain't come out yet.  Maybe she's fell asleep too."
+
+The two tip-toed to the window.  On the bed under the covers was little
+Patience, fast asleep, and beside her, on top of the covers, fully
+dressed, lay Lydia, an arm across her little sister, in the sleep of
+utter exhaustion.
+
+"I'll just take her shoes off and cover her and leave her till
+morning," said Lizzie.
+
+But Amos, gazing at his two ill-kempt little daughters, at the chaotic
+room, did not answer except to murmur to himself, "Oh, Patience!
+Patience!"
+
+The cottage was somewhat isolated.  Amos was three quarters of a mile
+from his work.  The schoolhouse was a mile away and the nearest
+trolley, which Lizzie must take to do the family shopping, was half a
+mile back along the dirt road.
+
+Nevertheless, all the family felt that they had taken a distinct step
+upward in moving into lake shore property and nobody complained of
+distances.  Amos began putting in his Sundays in cleaning up the
+bramble-grown acres he intended to turn into a garden in the spring.
+He could not afford to have it plowed so he spaded it all himself,
+during the wonderful bright fall Sabbaths.  Nor was this a hardship for
+Amos.  Only the farm bred can realize the reminiscent joy he took in
+wrestling with the sod, which gave up the smell that is more deeply
+familiar to man than any other in the range of human experience.
+
+A dairy farmer named Norton, up the road, gave him manure in exchange
+for the promise of early vegetables for his table.  After his spading
+was done in late September, Amos, with his wheelbarrow, followed by the
+two children, began his trips between the dairy farm and his garden
+patch and he kept these up until the garden was deep with fertilizer.
+
+There never had been a more beautiful autumn than this.  There was
+enough rain to wet down the soil for the winter, yet the Sundays were
+almost always clear.  Fields and woods stretched away before the
+cottage, crimson and green as the frosts came on.  Back of the cottage,
+forever gleaming through the scarlet of the autumn oaks, lay the lake,
+where duck and teal were beginning to lodge o' nights, in the
+rice-fringed nooks along the shore.
+
+Lydia was happier than she had been since her mother's death.  She took
+the long tramps to and from school, lunch box and school bag slung at
+her back, in a sort of ecstasy.  She was inherently a child of the
+woods and fields.  Their beauty thrilled her while it tranquilized her.
+Some of the weight of worry and responsibility that she had carried
+since her baby sister of two weeks had been turned over to her care
+left her.
+
+Kent was enchanted with the new home.  Football was very engrossing,
+yet he managed to get out for at least one visit a week.  He and Lydia
+discovered a tiny spring in the bank above the lake and they began at
+once to dam it in and planned a great series of ditches and canals.
+
+The doll's furniture was finished by October and Lydia began work on
+the doll's house.
+
+One Saturday afternoon early in October she was established on the
+front steps with her carpentry when a surrey stopped at the gate.
+Little Patience, in a red coat, rolled to her feet.  She had been
+collecting pebbles from the gravel walk.
+
+"Mardy!" she screamed.  "Baby's Mardy!" and started down the walk to
+meet Margery and her father.
+
+"Darn it," said Lydia to herself.  "Hello, Marg!  How de do, Mr.
+Marshall."
+
+"Well!  Well!"  Dave Marshall lifted the tails of his light overcoat
+and sat down on the steps.  "Gone into house building, eh, Lydia?  Did
+you do it all yourself?  Gee! that's not such a bad job."
+
+Lydia had the aptitude of a boy for tools.  On one end of the cracker
+box was a V-shaped roof.  There were two shelves within, making three
+floors, and Lydia was now hard at work with a chisel and jackknife
+hacking out two windows for each floor.
+
+She stood, chisel in hand, her red coat sleeves rolled to her elbows,
+her curly hair wind-tossed, staring at Marshall half proudly, half
+defiantly.
+
+Dave laughed delightedly.  "Lydia, any time your father wants to sell
+you, I'm in the market."  He looked at the nails hammered in without a
+crack or bruise in the wood, then laughed again.
+
+"Get your and the baby's hats, Lydia.  We stopped to take you for a
+ride."
+
+Lydia's eyes danced, then she shook her head.  "I can't!  The bread's
+in baking and I'm watching it."
+
+"Where's Lizzie?"
+
+"She went in town to do the marketing!  Darn it!  Don't I have awful
+luck?"
+
+Lydia sighed and looked from baby Patience and Margery, walking up and
+down the path, to Mrs. Marshall, holding the reins.
+
+"Well, anyhow," she said, with sudden cheerfulness, "Mrs. Marshall'll
+be glad I'm not coming, and some day, maybe you'll take me when she
+isn't with you."
+
+Dave started to protest, then the polite lie faded on his lips.  Lydia
+turned her pellucid gaze to his with such a look of mature
+understanding, that he ended by nodding as if she had indeed been grown
+up, and rising, said, "Perhaps you're right.  Good-by, my dear.  Come,
+Margery."
+
+Lydia stood with the baby clinging to her skirts.  There were tears in
+her eyes.  Sometimes she looked on the world that other children lived
+in, with the wonder and longing of a little beggar snub-nosed against
+the window of a French pastry shop.
+
+John Levine came home with Amos that night to supper.  Amos felt safe
+about an unexpected guest on Saturday nights for there was always a pot
+of baked beans, at the baking of which Lizzie was a master hand, and
+there were always biscuits.  Lydia was expert at making these.  She had
+taken of late to practising with her mother's old cook book and Amos
+felt as if he were getting a new lease of gastronomic life.
+
+"Well," said Levine, after supper was finished, the baby was asleep and
+Lydia was established with a copy of "The Water Babies" he had brought
+her, "I had an interesting trip, this week."
+
+Amos tossed the bag of tobacco to Levine.  "Where?"
+
+"I put in most of the week on horseback up on the reservation.  Amos,
+the pine land up in there is something to dream of.  Why, there's
+nothing like it left in the Mississippi Valley, nor hasn't been for
+twenty years.  Have you ever been up there?"
+
+Amos shook his head.  "I've just never had time.  It's a God-awful
+trip.  No railroad, twenty-mile drive--"
+
+Levine nodded.  "The Indians are in awful bad shape up there.  Agent's
+in it for what he can get, I guess.  Don't know as I blame him.  The
+sooner the Indians are gone the better it'll be for us and all
+concerned."
+
+"What's the matter with 'em?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Consumption--some kind of eye disease--starvation--"
+
+The child shivered and her eyes widened.
+
+"You'd better go on with the 'Water Babies,'" said John.  "Has Tom
+fallen into the river yet?"
+
+"No, he's just seen himself in the mirror," answered Lydia, burying her
+nose in the delectable tale again.
+
+"It's a wonderful story," said Levine, his black eyes reminiscent.
+
+  "'Clear and cool, clear and cool,
+  By laughing shallow and dreaming pool;
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+  Undefiled, for the undefiled;
+  Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child.'
+
+It has some unforgettable verse in it.  Well, as I was saying, Amos,
+that timber isn't going to stay up there and rot--_because, I'm going
+to get it out of there_!"
+
+"How?" asked Amos.
+
+"Act of Congress, maybe.  Maybe a railroad will get a permit to go
+through, eh?  There are several ways.  We'll die rich, yet, Amos."
+
+Amos pulled at his pipe and shook his head.  "You will but I won't.  It
+isn't in our blood."
+
+"Shucks, Amos.  Where's your nerve?"
+
+Amos looked at Levine silently for a moment.  Then he said huskily,
+
+"My nerve is gone with Patience.  And if she isn't in heaven, there
+isn't one, that's all."
+
+Lydia looked up from her story with a quick flash of tragedy in her
+eyes.
+
+"Well," said John, smiling at her gently, "if you don't want to be
+rich, Amos, Lydia does.  I'll give her the cottage here, the first
+fifty thousand I make off of Indian pine lands."
+
+"I swan," exclaimed Amos, "if you do that, I'll buy a cow and a pig and
+some chickens and I can pretty near make a living right here."
+
+"You're foolish, Amos.  This isn't New England.  This is the West.  All
+you've got to do is to keep your nerve, and any one with sense can make
+a killing.  Opportunity screams at you."
+
+"I guess she's always on my deaf side," said Amos.
+
+"When I grow up," said Lydia, suddenly, "I'm going to buy a ship and
+sail to Africa and explore the jungles."
+
+"I'll go with you, Lydia,", exclaimed Levine, "hanged if I don't sell
+my Indian lands for real money, and go right along with you."
+
+"Mr. Marshall says 'like Hell you'll get some Indian lands,'" mused the
+child.
+
+Both men exclaimed together, "What!"
+
+Lydia was confused but repeated her conversation with Marshall.
+
+"So that's the way the wind blows," said Levine.
+
+"You don't think for a minute there's a banker in town without one hand
+on the reservation," said Amos.  "Lydia, you're old enough now not to
+repeat conversations you hear at home.  Don't you ever tell anybody the
+things you hear me and Mr. Levine talk over.  Understand?" sharply.
+
+"Yes, Daddy," murmured Lydia, flushing painfully.
+
+"You don't have to jaw the child that way, Amos."  Levine's voice was
+impatient.  "Just explain things to her.  Why do you want to humiliate
+her?"
+
+Amos gave a short laugh.  "Takes a bachelor to bring up kids.  Run
+along to bed, Lydia."
+
+"Lydia's not a kid.  She's a grown-up lady in disguise," said Levine,
+catching her hand as she passed and drawing her to him.  "Good night,
+young Lydia!  If you were ten years older and I were ten years
+younger--"
+
+Lydia smiled through tear-dimmed eyes.  "We'd travel!" she said.
+
+Cold weather set in early this year.  Before Thanksgiving the lake was
+ice-locked for the winter.  The garden was flinty, and on Thanksgiving
+Day, three inches of snow fell.  The family rose in the dark.  Amos,
+with his dinner pail, left the house an hour before Lydia and the sun
+was just flushing the brown tree tops when she waved good-by to little
+Patience, whose lovely little face against the window was the last
+thing she saw in the morning, the first thing she saw watching for her
+return in the dusk of the early winter evening.
+
+Amos, always a little moody and a little restless, since the children's
+mother had gone to her last sleep, grew more so as the end of the year
+approached.  It was perhaps a week before Christmas on a Sunday
+afternoon that he called Lydia to him.  Patience was having her nap and
+Lizzie had gone to call on Mrs. Norton.
+
+Lydia, who was re-reading "The Water Babies," put it down reluctantly
+and came to her father's side.  Her heart thumped heavily.  Her
+father's depressed voice meant just one thing--money trouble.
+
+He was very gentle.  He put his hand on the dusty yellow of her hair.
+He was very careful of the children's hair.  Like many New England farm
+lads he was a jack of all trades.  He clipped Lydia's hair every month
+himself.
+
+"Your hair will be thick enough in another year, so's I won't have to
+cut it any more, Lydia.  It's coming along thick as felt.  Wouldn't
+think it was once thin, now."
+
+Lydia eyed her father's care-lined face uneasily.  Amos still hesitated.
+
+"Where'd you get that dress, my dear?" he asked.
+
+"Lizzie and I made it of that one of mother's," answered the child.
+"It isn't made so awful good, but I like to wear it, because it was
+hers."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Amos absently.
+
+The dress was a green serge, clumsily put together as a sailor suit,
+and the color fought desperately with the transparent blue of the
+little girl's eyes.
+
+"Lydia," said her father abruptly.  "You're a big girl now.  You asked
+for skates and a sled for Christmas.  My child, I don't see how you
+children are going to have anything extra for Christmas, except perhaps
+a little candy and an orange.  That note with Marshall comes due in
+January.  By standing Levine off on the rent, I can rake and scrape the
+interest together.  It's hopeless for me even to consider meeting the
+note.  What Marshall will do, I don't know.  If I could ever get on my
+feet--with the garden.  But on a dollar and a half a day, I swan--"
+
+"No Christmas at all?" quavered Lydia.  "Won't we even hang up our
+stockings?"
+
+"If you'll be contented just to put a little candy in them.  Come,
+Lydia, you're too big to hang up your stocking, anyhow."
+
+Lydia left her father and walked over to the window.  She pressed her
+face against the pane and looked back to the lake.  The sun was sinking
+in a gray rift of clouds.  The lake was a desolate plain of silvery
+gold touched with great shadows of purple where snow drifts were high.
+As she looked, the weight on her chest lifted.  The trembling in her
+hands that always came with the mention of money lessened.  The child,
+even as early as this, had the greatest gift that life bestows, the
+power of deriving solace from sky and hill and sweep of water.
+
+"Anyhow," she said to her father, "I've still got something to look
+forward to.  I've got the doll house to give baby, and Mr. Levine
+always gives me a book for Christmas."
+
+"That's a good girl!"  Amos gave a relieved sigh, then went on with his
+brooding over his unlighted pipe.
+
+And after all, this Christmas proved to be one of the high spots of
+Lydia's life.  She had a joyous 24th.  All the morning she spent in the
+woods on the Norton farm with her sled, cutting pine boughs.  As she
+trudged back through the farmyard, Billy Norton called to her.
+
+"Oh, Lydia!"
+
+Lydia stopped her sled against a drift and waited for Billy to cross
+the farmyard.  He was a large, awkward boy several years older than
+Lydia.  He seemed a very homely sort of person to her, yet she liked
+his face.  He was as fair as Kent was dark.  Kent's features were
+regular and clean-cut.  Billy's were rough hewn and irregular, and his
+hair and lashes were straight and blond.
+
+What Lydia could not at this time appreciate was the fact that Billy's
+gray eyes were remarkable in the clarity and steadiness of their gaze,
+that his square jaw and mobile mouth were full of fine promise for his
+manhood and that even at sixteen the framework of his great body was
+magnificent.
+
+He never had paid any attention to Lydia before and she was bashful
+toward the older boys.
+
+"Say, Lydia, want a brace of duck?  A lot of them settled at Warm
+Springs last night and I've got more than I can use."
+
+He leaned his gun against the fence and began to separate two birds
+from the bunch hanging over his shoulder.
+
+Lydia began to breathe quickly.  The Dudleys could not afford a special
+Christmas dinner.
+
+"I--I don't know how I could pay you, Bill--"
+
+"Who wants pay?" asked Bill, indignantly.
+
+"I dasn't take anything without paying for it," returned Lydia, her
+eyes still on the ducks.  "But I'd--I'd rather have those than a ship."
+
+Billy's clear gaze wandered from Lydia's thin little face to her
+patched mittens and back again.
+
+"Won't your father let you?" he asked.
+
+"I won't let myself," replied the little girl.
+
+"Oh!" said Billy, his gray eyes deepening.  "Well, let me have the
+evergreens and you go back for some more.  It'll save me getting Ma
+hers."
+
+With one thrust of her foot Lydia shoved the fragrant pile of boughs
+into the snow.  She tied the brace of duck to the sled and started back
+toward the wood, then paused and looked back at Billy.
+
+"Thank you a hundred times," she called.
+
+"It was a business deal.  No thanks needed," he replied.
+
+Lydia nodded and trudged off.  The boy stood for a moment looking at
+the little figure, then he started after her.
+
+"Lydia, I'll get that load of pines for you."
+
+She tossed a vivid smile over her shoulder.  "You will not.  It's a
+business deal."
+
+And Billy turned back reluctantly toward the barn.
+
+In an hour Lydia was panting up the steps into the kitchen.  Lizzie's
+joy was even more extreme than Lydia's.  She thawed the ducks out and
+dressed them, after dinner, with the two children standing so close as
+at times seriously to impede progress.
+
+"I'm lucky," said Lydia.  "There isn't anybody luckier than I am or has
+better things happen to 'em than I do.  I'd rather be me than a water
+baby."
+
+"Baby not a water baby.  Baby a duck," commented Patience, her hands
+full of bright feathers.
+
+"Baby is a duck," laughed Lydia.  "Won't Daddy be glad!"
+
+Amos was glad.  Plodding sadly home, he was greeted by three glowing
+faces in the open door as soon as his foot sounded on the porch.  The
+base burner in the living-room was clear and glowing.  The dining-room
+was fragrant with pine.  He was not allowed to take off his overcoat,
+but was towed to the kitchen where the two birds, trussed and stuffed
+for the baking, were set forth on the table.
+
+"I got 'em!" shouted Lydia.  "I got 'em off Billy Norton for a load of
+pine.  Christmas present for you, Daddy, from yours truly, Lydia!"  She
+seized the baby's hands and the two did a dance round Amos, shouting,
+"Christmas present!  Christmas present!" at the top of their lungs.
+
+"Well!  Well!" exclaimed Amos.  "Isn't that fine!  If Levine comes out
+to-morrow we can ask him to dinner, after all.  Can't we, Lizzie?"
+
+"You bet we can!" said Lizzie.  "And look at this.  I was going to keep
+it for a surprise.  I made it by your wife's recipe."
+
+She held an open Mason jar under Amos' nose.
+
+"Mince meat!" he exclaimed.  "Why, Lizzie, where'd you get the makings?"
+
+"Oh, a bit here and a bit there for the last two months.  Ain't it
+grand?" offering a smell to each of the children, who sniffed
+ecstatically.
+
+When the baby was safely asleep, Lydia appeared with two stockings
+which she hung on chair backs by the stove in the living-room.
+
+"I'm putting them up to hold the candy," she explained to her father,
+suggestively.
+
+He rose obediently and produced half a dozen oranges and a bag of candy.
+
+"Oh, that's gorgeous," cried Lydia, whose spirits to-night were not to
+be quenched.  She brought in the doll house.
+
+"See, Daddy," she said, with the pride of the master builder.  "I
+colored it with walnut juice.  And I found the wall paper in the attic."
+
+Amos got down on his knees and examined the tiny rooms and the cigar
+box furniture.  He chuckled delightedly.  "I swan," he said, "if
+Patience doesn't want it you can give it to me!"
+
+"I'm going to let Lizzie put the candy in the stockings," mused Lydia,
+"then I'll have that to look forward to.  I'm going to bed right now,
+so morning will come sooner."
+
+Alone with the stockings, into which Lizzie put the candy and oranges,
+Amos sat long staring at the base burner.  Without, the moon sailed
+high.  Wood snapping in the intense cold was the only sound on the
+wonder of the night.  Something of the urgent joy and beauty of the Eve
+touched Amos, for he finally rose and said,
+
+"Well, I've got two fine children, anyhow."  Then he filled up the
+stoves for the night and went to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RAVISHED NEST
+
+
+"The young pine bends to the storm.  The old pine breaks."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+It would be difficult to say which enjoyed the doll house more, Lydia
+or Patience.  It would be difficult to say which one was the more
+touched, Lizzie or Amos by the package each found on the breakfast
+table.  Amos unwrapped his to find therein a pipe tray fashioned from
+cigar box wood and stained with Lydia's walnut dye.  Lizzie's gift was
+a flat black pin-cushion, with "Lizzie, with love from Lydia,"
+embroidered crazily on it in red.  Florence Dombey showed no emotion
+over her gift, a string of red beads that had a curious resemblance to
+asparagus seed-pods, but she wore them gracefully and stared round-eyed
+at all the festivities.  Lydia and Patience each wore pinned to her
+dress a cotton handkerchief, Lizzie's gift.
+
+John Levine appeared at noon, laden like a pack horse.  This was his
+great opportunity during the year to do things for the Dudley children
+and he took full advantage of the moment.  Books for Lydia, little toys
+for the baby, a pipe for Amos, a woolen dress pattern for Lizzie, a
+blue sailor suit for Lydia, a fur hood for Patience.
+
+John's thin, sallow face glowed, his black eyes gleamed as he watched
+the children unwrap the packages.  In the midst of the excitement,
+Lydia shrieked.
+
+"My ducks!  My ducks!" and bolted for the kitchen.
+
+"The pie!" cried Lizzie, panting after her.
+
+"Don't tell me they're spoiled!" groaned Amos, as with John and the
+baby, he followed into the kitchen.
+
+"Safe!" shouted Lydia, on her knees before the oven.  "Just the pope's
+nose is scorched!  The pie is perfect."
+
+"Let's eat before anything else happens," said Amos, nervously.
+
+"Lord!" said John Levine, "who'd miss spending Christmas where there
+are children?  I'd a gotten out here to-day if I'd had to come
+barefooted."
+
+The dinner was eaten and pronounced perfect.  The gifts were
+re-examined and re-admired.  John Levine, with Lydia and Florence
+Dombey on his lap, Amos with the drowsy little Patience in his arms,
+and Lizzie, her tired hands folded across her comfortable stomach, sat
+round the base burner while the wind rose outside and the boom of the
+ice-locked lake filled the room from time to time.
+
+"Fearful cold when the ice cracks that way," said Amos.
+
+"'The owl, for all his feathers was a-cold,'" murmured Lydia.
+
+"Where'd you get that and what's the rest of it?" asked Levine.
+
+"Selected Gems," replied Lydia.  "It's a book at school.
+
+  "'St. Agnes Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was!
+  The owl for all his feathers was a-cold;
+  The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass
+  And silent was the flock in woolly fold.'
+
+I forget the rest."
+
+The grown-ups glanced at each other over the children's heads.
+
+"Say your pretty Christmas poem you spoke at school, Lydia," suggested
+old Lizzie.
+
+Lydia rested her head back comfortably on John's shoulder and rambled
+on in her childish contralto.
+
+  "Sing low, indeed: and softly bleat,
+  You lambing ewes about her feet,
+  Lest you should wake the child from sleep!
+  No other hour so still and sweet
+  Shall fall for Mary's heart to keep
+  Until her death hour on her creep,
+  Sing soft, the Eve of Mary."
+
+There was silence for a moment.
+
+"Why did you choose that one, young Lydia?" asked Levine.
+
+"I don't know.  I seemed to like it," answered Lydia.  "It's a girl's
+poem.  Gosh, I've been happy to-day!  Daddy, you thought we'd have an
+awful poor Christmas, didn't you?  Poor old Daddy!  Why, I've just felt
+all day as if my heart was on tip-toes."
+
+It had indeed been a high day for the child.  Perhaps she remembered it
+for years after as one of her perfect days, because of the heart
+breaking days that followed.
+
+For little Patience for the first time in her tiny life was taken ill.
+For three or four days after Christmas she was feverish and cross with
+a hoarse cold.  When Amos came home the fourth night, he thought she
+had the croup and sent Lydia pelting through the darkness for the dairy
+farmer's wife.  Mrs. Norton, the mother of Billy, was not long in
+coming to a decision.
+
+"'Tain't regular croup.  You go after the doctor, Mr. Dudley."
+
+Patience, frightened by her difficult breathing, would let no one but
+Lydia touch her.  Under Mrs. Norton's supervision, she packed the baby
+in hot water bottles while Lizzie heated water and stoked the fires
+till the stove doors glowed red.
+
+Amos came back with the doctor about nine o'clock.  Patience was in a
+stupor.  The doctor sent Lydia away while he made his examination.  The
+child clenched her fists and walked up and down the livingroom, cheeks
+scarlet, eyes blazing.  Suddenly she dropped on her knees by the window
+and lifted her clasped hands to the stars.
+
+"God!  God, up there!" she called.  "If you let her die, I'll never
+pray to you again!  Never!  I warned You when You let mother die!"
+
+She remained a moment on her knees, staring at the stars while
+fragments of Sunday School lore flashed through her mind.  "Our Father
+who art in heaven," she said.  "No, that won't do.  Suffer little
+children to come unto me.  Oh, no, no."
+
+The door opened and Lizzie came out, tears-running down her cheeks.
+Lydia flew to her.
+
+"They say I got to tell you.  Diphtheritic croup--her lungs is full--no
+hope."
+
+Lydia struck the kind old hand from her shoulder and dashed out of the
+house.  She ran through the snow to a giant pine by the gate and beat
+her fists against it for how long she did not know.  Pain in her
+bruised hands and the intense cold finally brought her to her senses.
+A self-control that was partly inherent and partly the result of too
+early knowledge of grief and of responsibility came to her rescue.
+With a long sigh, she walked steadily into the house and into the room
+where the baby sister lay in a stupor, breathing stertorously.
+
+The doctor and Amos were there.  Mrs. Norton was now soothing Lizzie in
+the kitchen, now obeying the doctor's orders.  Amos did not stir from
+his chair by the bed, nor speak a word, all that night.  The doctor was
+in his shirt sleeves, prepared to fight as best he could.
+
+"Go out, Lydia," said Dr. Fulton, quietly.
+
+"She'll want me," replied the child.
+
+The doctor looked at Lydia keenly.  He knew her well.  He had ushered
+her as well as Patience into the world.  He pulled her to him, with one
+hand, not relinquishing his hold on the baby's pulse with the other.
+
+"She's in a stupor and won't miss you, Lydia.  She is not suffering at
+all.  Now, I want you to go to bed like a good girl."
+
+"I won't," said Lydia, quietly.
+
+"Lydia," the doctor went on, as if he were talking to a grown person,
+"all your life you will be grateful to me, if I make you obey me now.
+I know those wild nerves of yours, too much and too early controlled.
+_Lydia, go to bed_!"
+
+Not because she feared him but because some knowledge beyond her years
+told her of his wisdom, Lydia turned, found Florence Dombey in the
+living-room and with her and a blanket, crept under her father's bed,
+into the farthest corner where she lay wide-eyed until dawn.  Some one
+closed the door into the room then, and shortly, she fell asleep.
+
+In three days, the like of which are the longest, the shortest days of
+life, the house had returned to the remnant of its old routine.  The
+place had been fumigated.  Lydia had placed in her bedroom everything
+that had belonged to the baby, had locked the door and had moved
+herself into Lizzie's room.  Amos departed before dawn as usual with
+his dinner pail, stumbling like an old man, over the road.
+
+The quarantine sign was on the house and no one but the undertaker, the
+doctor, Mrs. Norton and John Levine had been allowed to come to see the
+stricken little family, excepting the minister.  He, poor man, had
+babies of his own, and had been nervous during the few short minutes of
+the service.
+
+Lydia and Lizzie put in the morning cleaning the cottage.  Never since
+they had lived in it had the little house been so spic and span.  At
+noon, they sat down to lunch in a splendor of cleanliness that made the
+place seem stranger than ever to them both.  Neither talked much.  At
+intervals, tears ran down old Lizzie's wrinkled cheeks and Lydia looked
+at her wonderingly.  Lydia had not shed a tear.  But all the time her
+cheeks were scarlet, her hands were cold and trembled and her stomach
+ached.
+
+"You must eat, childie.  You haven't eat enough to keep a bird alive
+since--since--"
+
+There was a bang on the door, and Lizzie trundled over to open it.
+
+"For the Lord's sake, Kent!"
+
+Kent it was, big and rosy with his skates over his shoulders.  He
+walked into the living-room deliberately.
+
+"Hello, Lydia," he said, "I came out to see your Christmas presents."
+
+Lydia clasped her hands.  "Oh, Kent, I'm so glad!  But you can't stay!
+We're quarantined."
+
+"What the seventeen thunder-bugs do I care," returned Kent, gruffly,
+looking away from Lydia's appealing eyes.
+
+Lydia laughed, as she always did at Kent's astonishing oaths.  At the
+sound of the laughter, old Lizzie gave a sigh as though some of her own
+tense nerves had relaxed.
+
+"Now see here," growled Kent, "they've got no business to shut you up
+this way.  You come out and skate for a while.  The wind's blown the
+snow till there's lots of clear places.  I got up here without much
+trouble.  We won't meet anybody at this end of the lake."
+
+"Just the thing, quarantine or not!" exclaimed, Lizzie, briskly.  "And
+I'll cook a surprise for the two of you.  Keep her out an hour, Kent."
+
+Lydia silently got into overcoat and leggings and pulled on her Tam o'
+Shanter.  She brought her skates from the kitchen and the two children
+made their way to the lake shore.
+
+It was a brilliant afternoon.  The vast white expanse of the lake was
+dotted with the flash of opals wherever the wind had exposed the ice to
+the winter sun.  Far down the lake toward the college shore, the
+flitting sails of ice-boats gleamed, and faint and far up the wind came
+the clear "cling-pling" of their steel runners.  The mercury was
+hovering around ten or twelve above zero as the fierce booming of the
+expanding ice attested.
+
+With unwonted consideration, Kent helped Lydia strap on her skates.
+Then the two started, hand in hand, up the lake.  They skated well, as
+did most of the children of the community.  The wind in their faces was
+bitter cold, making conversation difficult.  Whether or not Kent was
+grateful for this, one could not say.  He watched Lydia out of the tail
+of his eye and as the wind whipped the old red into her cheeks, he
+began to whistle.  They had been going perhaps fifteen minutes when the
+little girl stumbled several times.
+
+"What's the matter, Lyd?" asked Kent.
+
+"I don't know," she panted.  "I--I guess I'm tired."
+
+"Tired already!  Gosh!  And you've always worn me out.  Come on up to
+the shore, and I'll make a fire, so's you can rest."
+
+Lydia, who always had scorned the thought of rest, while at play,
+followed meekly and stood in silence while Kent without removing his
+skates hobbled up the bank and pulled some dead branches to the shore.
+Shortly he had a bright blaze at her feet.  He kicked the snow off a
+small log.
+
+"Sit down--here where you get the warmth," he ordered, his voice as
+gruff as he could make it.
+
+Lydia sat down obediently, her mittened hands clasping her knees.  Kent
+stood staring at his little chum.  He took in the faded blue Tam, the
+outgrown coat, the red mittens, so badly mended, the leggings with
+patches on the knees.  Then he eyed the heavy circles around her eyes
+and the droop to the mouth that was meant to be merry.
+
+"I'm sorriest for Lydia," his mother had said that morning.  "No mother
+could feel much worse than she does, and she's got no one to turn to
+for comfort.  I know Amos.  He'll shut up like a clam.  Just as soon as
+they're out of quarantine, I'll go out there."
+
+Kent was only a boy, but he was mature in spite of his heedless ways.
+Staring at the tragedy in Lydia's ravished little face, a sympathy for
+her pain as real as it was unwonted swept over him.  Suddenly he
+dropped down beside her on the log and threw his boyish arms about her.
+
+"I'm so doggone sorry for you, Lydia!" he whispered.
+
+Lydia lifted startled eyes to his.  Never before had Kent shown her the
+slightest affection.  When she saw the sweetness and sympathy in his
+brown gaze,
+
+"Oh, Kent," she whispered, "why did God let it happen!  Why did He?"
+and she buried her face on his shoulder and began to sob.  Softly at
+first, then with a racking agony of tears.
+
+Even a child is wise in the matter of grief.  Kent's lips trembled, but
+he made no attempt to comfort Lydia.  He only held her tightly and
+watched the fire with bright, unseeing eyes.  And after what seemed a
+long, long time, the sobs grew less.  Finally, he slipped a pocket
+handkerchief into Lydia's hand.  It was gray with use but of a
+comforting size.
+
+"Wipe your eyes, old lady," he said in a cheerful, matter of fact tone.
+"I've got to put the fire out, so's we can start home."
+
+Lydia mopped her face and by the time Kent had the fire smothered with
+snow, she was standing, sad-eyed but calm except for dry sobs.  Kent
+picked up one of the sticks he had brought for the fire.
+
+"Catch hold," he said, "I'll pull you home."
+
+Old Lizzie was watching for them and when they came stamping into the
+dining-room, they found a pitcher of steaming cocoa and a plate of
+bread and butter with hot gingerbread awaiting them.
+
+"See if you can get her to eat, Kent," said Lizzie.
+
+"Sure, she'll eat," Kent answered her.  "Gimme back my hanky, Lyd!"
+
+Lizzie gave a keen look at Lydia's tear-stained face and turned
+abruptly into the kitchen.  She came back in a moment to find Lydia
+silently eating what Kent had set before her.
+
+Kent ate hugely and talked without cessation.  About what, Lydia did
+not know, for the sleep that had been long denied her was claiming her.
+She did not know that she almost buried her head in her second cup of
+cocoa, nor that Kent helped carry her to the couch behind the
+living-room base burner.
+
+"Is she sick?  Shall I get the doctor?" he whispered as old Lizzie
+tucked a shawl over her.
+
+"Sick!  No!  No!  She's just dead for sleep.  She's neither cried nor
+eat nor had a decent hour of sleep since it happened.  And now, thanks
+to you, she's done all three.  You are a good boy, Kent Moulton."
+
+Kent looked suddenly foolish and embarrassed.  "Aw--that's nothing," he
+muttered.  "Where's my coat?  Maybe I'll come out again to-morrow, if I
+ain't got anything better to do."
+
+All the rest of the winter afternoon, Lydia slept.  The sun dipped low
+beyond the white hills, filling the living-room with scarlet for one
+breathless moment, before a blanket of twilight hid all save the red
+eyes of the base burner.  Amos came home at seven and he and Lizzie ate
+supper in silence except for the old lady's story of Kent's visit.
+
+"Poor young one," muttered Amos, looking slowly toward the quiet blond
+head on the faded brown cushion.  "I'm glad she's a child and 'll
+forget it soon."
+
+Lizzie gave Amos a curious glance.  "You don't know Lydia, Amos," she
+said.
+
+He did not seem to hear her.  He moved his chair toward the stove, put
+his feet on the fender, lighted his pipe and then sat without moving
+until a stamping of feet and a hearty rap on the door roused him.
+Lizzie let John Levine in.
+
+"Where's Lydia?" was Levine's first Question.
+
+Lizzie pointed to the couch, where, undisturbed, Lydia slept on.
+
+"Good!" said John.  He drew his chair up beside Amos' and the two fell
+into low-voiced conversation.
+
+It must have been nine o'clock when Lydia opened her eyes to hear Amos
+say fretfully,
+
+"I tell you, I went to him to-day as I'll go to no man again.  I begged
+him to renew the note, but he insisted his duty to the bank wouldn't
+let him.  I told him it would put you in a terrible fix, that you'd
+gone on the note when you couldn't afford it.  He grinned a devil's
+grin then and said, 'Amos, I know you've got nothing to lose in this.
+If you had, for the sake of your children--I mean Lydia, I'd hold off.
+But Levine can fix it up!'"
+
+"So I could, ordinarily," said Levine in a troubled voice.  "But it
+just happens that everything I've got on earth is shoe-stringed out to
+hang onto that pine section of mine up in Bear county.  I'm mortgaged
+up to my eyebrows.  Marshall knows it and sees a chance to get hold of
+the pines, damn him!"
+
+Lydia sat up and rubbed her eyes.
+
+"Well!  Well! young Lydia," cried Levine.  "Had a fine sleep, didn't
+you!"
+
+"I'm awful hungry," said the child.
+
+"Bless your soul," exclaimed Lizzie.  "I'll warm your supper up for you
+in a minute."
+
+Lydia stood with hands outstretched to the base burner, her hair
+tumbled, her glance traveling from Amos to Levine.
+
+"What makes Mr. Marshall act so?" she asked.
+
+"Sho," said Levine, "little girls your age don't know anything about
+such things, do they, Amos?  Come here.  You shall eat your supper on
+my lap."
+
+"I'm getting too old for laps," said Lydia, coming very willingly
+nevertheless within the compass of John's long arms.  "But I love you
+next to Daddy now, in all the world."
+
+John swept her to his knees and put his cheek against hers for a
+moment, while tears gleamed in his black eyes.
+
+"Eat your supper and go to bed, Lydia," said Amos.
+
+"Don't be so cross, Amos," protested Levine.
+
+"God knows I'm not cross--to Lydia of all people in the world," sighed
+Amos, "but she worries over money matters just the way her mother did
+and I want to finish talking this over with you."
+
+"There's nothing more to talk about," Levine's voice was short.  "Let
+him call in the loan, the fat hog!"
+
+Lydia slept the long night through.  She awoke refreshed and renewed.
+After first adjusting herself to the awful sense of loss, which is the
+worst of waking in grief, the recollection of the conversation she had
+heard the night before returned with sickening vividness.  After she
+had wiped the breakfast dishes for Lizzie she stood for a long time at
+the living-room window with Florence Dombey in her arms staring at the
+lake.  Finally, she tucked the doll up comfortably on the couch and
+announced to Lizzie that she was going skating.
+
+An hour later, Dave Marshall heard his clerk protesting outside his
+door and a childish voice saying, "But please, just for a minute.  He
+likes me.  He truly does."
+
+Then the door opened and Lydia, breathless and rosy and threadbare,
+came into his little private office.  She closed the door and stood
+with her back against it, unsmiling.
+
+"I'm in quarantine," she said, "so I won't come near you."
+
+"Why, Lydia!" exclaimed Marshall, "where did you come from!"
+
+"Home.  Mr. Marshall, won't you fix Daddy's note if he gives you me?"
+
+"Huh!" ejaculated Marshall.
+
+"You said last fall," the child went on, her voice quavering but her
+eyes resolute, "that if Daddy ever wanted to sell me, you'd buy me.  I
+think I ought to be worth a thousand dollars.  I can do so much work
+around the house and help you train Margery!  I can work hard.  You ask
+John Levine."
+
+Marshall's fat face was purple and then pale.
+
+"Does your father know you're here, Lydia?" he asked.
+
+She clasped her mittened hands in sudden agitation.
+
+"Nobody knows but you," she exclaimed.  "Oh! you mustn't tell the man
+out there my name.  I'm in quarantine and I'd be arrested, if the
+health office knew!"
+
+"I won't tell," said Dave, gently.  "Come over here by me, Lydia.
+Margery is away on a visit so I'm not afraid for her."
+
+Lydia crossed the room.  Marshall took the skates from her shoulders
+and unfastened her coat.
+
+"Sit down on that chair and let's talk this over.  You know what a note
+is, do you, Lydia?"
+
+"It's money you owe," she said, her blue eyes anxiously fixed on
+Marshall's face.
+
+He nodded.  "Yes.  When your mother was sick, your father asked my bank
+here to lend him a thousand dollars for two years.  Now, your father is
+very poor.  He doesn't own anything that's worth a thousand dollars and
+I knew he could never pay it back.  So I told him he must get some one
+to promise to pay that money for him if he couldn't, at the end of the
+two years.  Understand?"
+
+Lydia nodded.
+
+"Well, he got John Levine.  Now the two years are up and unless that
+thousand dollars is paid, the people whose money I take care of in the
+bank, will each lose some of that thousand.  See?"
+
+Lydia stared at him, struggling to take in the explanation.  "I see,"
+she said.  "But if you'd pay a thousand dollars for me, that would fix
+it all up."
+
+"Why Lydia, do you mean you would leave your father?"
+
+"I wouldn't want to," she answered earnestly, "but Lizzie could take
+care of Daddy.  He doesn't really need me.  There isn't anybody really
+needs me--needs me--now--"
+
+She swallowed a sob, then went on.  "Mr. Levine just mustn't pay it.
+He's awful worried.  His land's fixed so's he'd never get over it.  And
+he's the best friend we have in all the world.  He just mustn't pay it.
+It would kill mother, if she knew.  Oh, she hated borrowing so."
+
+Marshall chewed his cigar.  "Levine," he growled, "is a long legged
+crook."
+
+Lydia flew out of her chair and shook her fist in the banker's face.
+"Don't you dare say that!" she cried.  "He's a dear lamb, that's what
+he is."
+
+Dave's fat jaw dropped.  "A dear lamb, eh?  Ask him some time what a
+land shark is--a dear lamb?"
+
+He went on chewing his cigar and Lydia returned to her chair.  Whether
+it was the anxious round eyes, above the scarlet cheeks, whether it was
+the wistful droop of the childish lips, whether it was the look that
+belongs to ravished motherhood and seemed grossly wrong on a child's
+face, whether it was some thought of his own pampered little daughter,
+whether it was that curious appeal Lydia always made to men, or a
+combination of all, that moved Marshall, he could not have told.  But
+suddenly he burst forth.
+
+"Good God, I've done hard things in my life, but I can't do this!
+Lydia, you go home and tell your father I'll renew that note, but he's
+got to pay the interest and ten per cent. of the principal, every year
+till he's paid it up.  Here, I'll write it down.  And tell him that I'm
+not doing it for him or for that skunk of a Levine, but I'm doing it
+for you.  Here, I'll write that down, _too_."
+
+He folded the bit of paper and put it in an envelope.  "Come here," he
+said.  He pinned the note into the pocket of her blouse.  "Understand,
+Lydia," he said in a low voice, tilting her head up so that he looked
+down into her eyes, "I'm buying your friendship with this.  You go on
+living with your father and taking care of him, but I'm buying your
+friendship for me and Margery--for good and all."  He looked out of the
+window with a curious air of abstraction.  Then, "Button your coat and
+run along."
+
+"I haven't thanked you," exclaimed Lydia, "I can't thank you.  Oh, but
+thank you, Mr. Marshall--I--I--" she began to tremble violently.
+
+"Stop!" roared Marshall.  "And you tell your father to look out for
+your nerves.  Now skip."  And Lydia's trembling stopped and she skipped.
+
+She did not tell Lizzie of her errand and that faithful soul was too
+glad to see her eat her dinner to think to ask her why she had skated
+so long.  Kent came out in the afternoon and the two fished through the
+ice until sunset, when they came in with a string of fish sufficiently
+long to divide and make a meal for the Dudleys and the Moultons.  At
+dusk, Kent departed with his fish and "Men of Iron," loaned by Lydia as
+a special favor, under his arm.
+
+Old Lizzie cleaned the fish and Lydia fried them, with the daintiness
+and skill that seemed to have been born in her.  She laid an envelope
+at her father's plate and when he sat down, silent and abstracted,
+without heeding the fish, she shook her head at Lizzie who was about to
+protest.
+
+"Where'd this come from?" he asked, absentmindedly opening the
+envelope.  Then, "For God's sake!  Lydia--where? how?"
+
+"It was like this," said Lydia.  "Set the fish back to warm, while I
+explain, Lizzie.  It was like this--" and she gave a full history of
+her morning's visit, to her two speechless listeners.  "And I ran all
+the way to the lake and I skated like the wind, and I never told Lizzie
+a word, though I nearly busted!"
+
+Amos looked from Lydia to Lizzie, from Lizzie to Lydia.
+
+"Lydia--my little daughter--" he faltered.
+
+The tears flew to Lydia's eyes and she spoke hastily, "Lizzie, show him
+the fish we caught!"
+
+Amos smiled while he shook his head.  "I won't forget it, Lydia.  In
+spite of little Patience's going, you've taken ten years off me this
+night.  What do you suppose John Levine will say?"
+
+"He'll say," replied Lydia, taking her serving of fish, "'If you were
+ten years older, Lydia, and I were ten years younger,' and I'll
+say--'then we'd travel.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ADAM
+
+
+"A thousand deaths have fed my roots--yet to what end?"--_The Murmuring
+Pine_.
+
+
+The days slipped by, as days will, even though they are grief laden.
+Slowly and inarticulately for the most part, Lydia struggled to adjust
+herself to her new loss.  She went back to school, after the quarantine
+was lifted and the familiar routine there helped her.  She was a good
+student and was doing well in the eighth grade.  During school hours
+her books absorbed her, and she worried through the evenings reading or
+sewing, with Florence Dombey always in her lap.
+
+Florence Dombey was a great comfort to the child.  She slept at night
+with her black head beside Lydia's yellow one.  Sometimes she slipped
+into the middle of the bed and fat Lizzie rolled on her and woke with a
+groan.
+
+"I'd just as soon sleep with a cannon-ball at my back," the good soul
+told Lydia.  But she never uttered a more violent protest.
+
+Lydia never entered the locked bedroom off the kitchen.  Amos,
+self-absorbed and over-worked, asked no questions, but one night in
+April, John Levine saw Lydia at work on a night dress for Florence
+Dombey.
+
+"Where does the young lady sleep?" he asked.
+
+Lydia explained and Lizzie uttered her mild plaint, adding, "Lydia
+ought to be getting back to her own bed, now warm weather will be
+coming in."
+
+Lydia caught her lower lip in her teeth but said nothing.  Levine
+scrutinized the curly head bent over the sewing, then went on with his
+conversation with Amos.  He was working quietly on his campaign, a year
+hence, for the office of sheriff and Amos, who was an influential
+Mason, was planning to use his influence for his friend.  Lydia,
+absorbed in sad little memories over her sewing or happily drugged in
+some book, heeded these discussions only subconsciously.
+
+Just before leaving, John asked for a drink of water and Amos went to
+the pump to bring in a fresh pail.  He stopped while there to fuss over
+a barrel in which he had an old hen setting on some eggs he had got
+from Mrs. Norton.  Lizzie had gone to bed early.
+
+"Young Lydia," said John, as soon as they were alone, "come here."
+
+When she was perched in her old place on his knee, "Don't you think
+it's time for you to get back to your own bedroom with its view of the
+lake?" he asked.
+
+Lydia looked at him dumbly.
+
+"You don't like to sleep in that stuffy bedroom with Lizzie, do you,
+dear?"
+
+"No," replied the child.  "She's fat and snores and won't have the
+window open--but--"
+
+"But what?" Levine's voice was gentle.
+
+"I'm afraid to sleep alone."
+
+"Afraid?  Lydia--not of any memory of dear little Patience!"
+
+"No!  No! but I have nightmares nearly every night--she--she's choking
+and I--I can't help her.  Then I wake up and catch hold of Lizzie.  Oh,
+don't make me sleep alone!"
+
+"Why, my dear little girl--"  John caught the child's thin hands in a
+firm, warm grip.  She was trembling violently and her fingers twitched.
+"This won't do!  That's what keeps the dark rings round your eyes, is
+it?  Of course you shan't sleep alone!  How does school go?"
+
+"Fine," answered the child.  "I hate grammar and diagramming, but the
+rest is easy."
+
+"And what book are you reading now?"
+
+"I'm starting 'David Copperfield.'"
+
+"Here comes your father.  It's bedtime, isn't it?  Good night, my dear."
+
+Lydia picked up Florence Dombey and went slowly off to bed as her
+father came in with a glass of water.
+
+"That fool hen isn't fully convinced she wants a family," he said.
+
+The bedroom door closed after Lydia.
+
+"Amos," said John, "that child's nerves are all shot to pieces."  He
+related his conversation with Lydia.
+
+"What can I do?" asked Amos, with a worried air.  "Seems to me she's
+just got to wear it out.  It's awful hard she's had to be up against
+these things--but, I swan!--"
+
+Levine grunted and put on his hat.  "I wish she was my daughter," he
+said.  "If you'll ask Brown to come around to the Elks Club to-morrow,
+I'll talk to him."
+
+Amos nodded and John mounted his bicycle and rode away.  On the Friday
+afternoon following when Lydia got home from school, she found the
+house apparently deserted.  But there issued from the neighborhood of
+the kitchen a yipping and ki-yi-ing that would have moved a heart of
+stone.  Lydia ran into the kitchen.  The puppy wails came from behind
+the door of the old bedroom.
+
+"Who's in there!" she called.
+
+The yipping changed to deep barks of joy.  Lydia tried the door.  It
+opened easily and a great, blundering puppy hurled himself at her.
+Lydia was a dog lover.
+
+"You love!  You lamb!" she cried.  She squatted on the floor and the
+pup crowded his great hulk into her lap, licking her face and wagging
+his whole body.
+
+There was a note tied to his collar.  Lydia untied it: "Dearest Young
+Lydia:--Here is a friend who wants to share your bedroom with you.  You
+must bring him up to be a polite, obedient dog, and a credit to your
+other friend, John Levine."
+
+"Oh!" squealed Lydia.  "Oh! but why did they tie you in here!"  She
+looked about the room.  The old bed had been moved out and the
+dining-room couch moved in.  The bureau had been shifted to another
+corner.  There was nothing to be seen of all little Patience's
+belongings.  It did not look like the same room.
+
+As she clung to the squirming puppy and stared, Lizzie came in.
+
+"Ain't it nice?" she asked.  "Mr. Levine came out with the dog this
+afternoon and suggested the change.  He helped me.  We stored all the
+other things up in the attic.  See the old quilt in the corner?  That's
+for the dog to sleep on.  Ain't he as big as an elephant!  I'm afraid
+he'll eat as much as a man."
+
+"He can have half of my food," cried Lydia.  "Oh, Lizzie, isn't he
+beautiful!"
+
+"Well, no," replied Lizzie, truthfully.  "He looks to me as if some one
+had stepped on his face.  You'd better take him out for a run."
+
+John Levine never did a wiser or a kinder thing than to give the
+brindle English bulldog to Lydia.  He was a puppy of nine months, well
+bred and strong.  Lydia took him into her empty little heart with a
+completeness that belongs to the natural dog lover and that was
+enhanced by her bereavement.  And he, being of a breed that is as
+amiable and loyal as it is unlovely to look upon, attached himself
+unalterably and entirely to Lydia.  She and Kent cast about some time
+before deciding on a name.  At first they thought seriously of naming
+him John, after the donor, but decided that this might lead to
+confusion.  Then they discovered that Levine's middle name was Adam,
+and Adam the brindle bull became, forthwith.
+
+Lydia made no objection to returning to the old room.  It had lost its
+familiar outlines.  And Adam, refusing the quilt on the floor,
+established himself on the foot of the couch where all night long he
+snuffled and snored and Lydia, who had objected to Lizzie's audible
+slumbers, now, waking with nightmares, heard Adam's rumbling with a
+sigh of relief, pressed her feet for comfort against his warm,
+throbbing body, and went off to sleep immediately.
+
+In May the garden was planted and in June, Lydia graduated from the
+eighth grade, and the long summer vacation had begun.  Margery
+Marshall, although Lydia's age, was not a good student and was two
+grades below her.  After the episode of the note, Lydia made a
+conscientious effort to play with Margery at recess and when vacation
+began, she called for the banker's daughter regularly every week to go
+swimming.
+
+Occasionally Elviry would invite her into the house to wait for
+Margery.  At such times Lydia would stare with wondering delight at the
+marvels of the quartered oak, plush upholstered furniture, the
+"Body-Brussels" rugs, and the velour portičres that adorned the parlor.
+
+Outwardly this summer was much like the previous one, except that there
+was a quiet contentment about Amos in spite of his real mourning for
+his baby daughter, that had been foreign to him for years.  It was the
+garden that did this.  Not only was it a wonderful garden to look on
+and to eat from, but with it Amos paid for milk and butter from the
+Nortons and for a part of his groceries.  This made possible the year's
+interest and payment on the note.
+
+Lydia sewed for Florence Dombey, climbed trees, swam and played pirates
+with Kent.  But as a matter of fact, the old childish zest for these
+things had gone.  For Lydia's real childhood had left her that December
+night she had spent under the far corner of her father's bed.  She had
+not prayed since then.  Her young faith in the kindness and sweetness
+of life, badly shaken by her mother's death, had been utterly destroyed
+when little Patience had been taken from her.
+
+With Adam at her heels, she took to solitary tramping through the
+neighboring woods where at times she met Indians from the
+reservation--a buck asleep on a log--a couple of squaws laughing and
+chatting while they ate food they had begged--an Indian boy, dusty and
+tired, resting after a trip to Lake City.  Lydia was a little afraid of
+these dark folk, though they always smiled at her.  She would jerk at
+Adam's collar and cuff his ears for growling, then make off toward home.
+
+It was a walk of just a mile from the cottage to the High School.
+Lydia was very nervous about her first day at High School.  Kent was
+entering at the same time and she would have liked to have asked to go
+with him but she knew he would resent violently being associated with a
+girl on so important an occasion.
+
+So it was that one of the teachers observed a child in a faded but
+clean galatea sailor suit, with curly blond hair barely long enough to
+tie in her neck, standing in one of the lower halls after the mob of
+seven or eight hundred boys and girls had been successfully herded into
+the great Assembly room.
+
+"What is your name, my dear?" asked the teacher.
+
+Lydia silently presented her promotion card.  The teacher nodded.
+
+"Come along, Miss Dudley, or you'll miss the principal's speech."
+
+She seated Lydia near her in the Assembly room, then looked her over
+curiously.  The child's face was remarkably intelligent, a high bred
+little face under a finely domed head.  The back of her ears and the
+back of her neck were dirty, and her thin hands were rough as if with
+housework.  The galatea sailor suit was cheap and coarse.
+
+"A sick mother or no mother," was the teacher's mental note.  "I must
+inquire about her.  Almost too bashful to breathe.  Precocious
+mentally, a child physically.  I'll look out for her to-day."
+
+Miss Towne had the reputation of an unfeeling disciplinarian among the
+pupils, but Lydia did not know this.  She only knew that by some
+miracle of kindness she came to understand the classroom system of
+recitations, that she was introduced to different teachers, that she
+learned how to decipher the hours of her recitations from the
+complicated chart on the Assembly room blackboard, and that at noon she
+started for home with a list of textbooks to be purchased, and a
+perfectly clear idea of what to do when she returned on the morrow.
+
+The streets were full of children of all ages flocking toward the book
+stores.  Lydia walked along slowly, thinking deeply.  She knew that her
+list of books came to something over five dollars.  She knew that this
+sum of money would floor her father and she knew that she would rather
+beg on the streets than start Amos on one of his tirades on his poverty.
+
+She pegged along homeward, half elated over the excitement of the day,
+half depressed over her book problem.  When she turned into the dirt
+road.  Billy Norton overtook her.  He was wearing a very high starched
+collar and a new suit of clothes.  Billy was a senior and felt his
+superiority.  Nevertheless, he wanted to tell his troubles--even to a
+first year pupil.
+
+"Gee, don't I have the luck!" he groaned.  "I could get on the School
+football team, I know it, if I didn't have to come home right after
+school to deliver milk.  Hang it!"
+
+Lydia looked at him quickly.  "How much milk do you have to deliver?"
+
+"Aw, just a snag.  Two quarts up the road to Essers' and two to
+Stones'.  They both got babies and have to have it.  Think of putting
+me off the school team for four quarts of baby milk!"
+
+"Oh, Billy," gasped Lydia, "I'll do it for you--if--Billy, have you got
+your freshman textbooks still?"
+
+"Sure," answered the boy.  "They're awful banged up, but I guess all
+the pages are there."
+
+Lydia was breathless with excitement.  "Billy, if you'll let me have
+your books, I'll carry the milk for you, all winter."
+
+The big boy looked at the little girl, curiously.
+
+"They're a ratty lot of old books, Lydia.  Half the fun of having
+school books is getting new ones."
+
+"I know that," she answered, flushing.
+
+"Hanged if I'll do it.  Let your dad get you new ones."
+
+"He'd like to as well as any one, but he can't right now and I'm going
+to look out for my own.  Oh, Billy, let me do it!"
+
+"You can have 'em all and welcome," exclaimed Billy, with a sudden
+huskiness in his voice.  "Gosh, you're awful little, Lydia."
+
+Lydia stamped her foot.  "I won't take anything for nothing.  And I'm
+not little.  I'm as strong as a horse."
+
+"Well," conceded Billy, "just till after Thanksgiving is all I want.
+Come on along home now and we'll fix it up with Ma."
+
+Ma Norton twisted Lydia around and retied her hair ribbon while she
+listened.  They all knew Lydia's pride, so she quenched the impulse to
+give the child the books and said, "Till Thanksgiving is plenty of pay,
+Billy, and when the snow comes, the two mile extra walking will be too
+much.  Get the books out of the parlor closet.  You got a--a--ink on
+the back of your neck, Lydia.  Wait till I get it off for you."
+
+She wet a corner of a towel at the tea kettle and proceeded to scour
+the unsuspecting Lydia's neck and ears.  "Children in the high school
+are apt to get ink in the _back_ of their necks and _ears_," she said.
+"_Always_ scrub there, Lydia!  Remember!"
+
+"Yes, Ma'm!  Oh, gosh, what a big pile!  Thank you ever so much, Billy.
+I'll be here right after school to-morrow, Mrs. Norton."
+
+Lydia spent a blissful evening mending and cleaning Billy's textbooks,
+with Adam snoring under her feet and her father absorbed in his
+newspaper.
+
+The delivering of the milk was no task at all, though had it not been
+for Adam trudging beside her with his rolling bulldog gait and his
+slavering ugly jaw, she would have been afraid in the early dusk of the
+autumn evenings.
+
+The High School was a different world from that of the old ward school.
+The ward school, comprising children of only one neighborhood with the
+grades small, was a democratic, neighborly sort of place.  The High
+School gathered together children from all over town, of all classes,
+from the children of lumber kings and college professors, to the
+offspring of the Norwegian day laborer and the German saloon keeper.
+There were even several colored children in the High School as well as
+an Indian lad named Charlie Jackson.  In the High School, class feeling
+was strong.  There were Greek letter societies in the fourth grade,
+reflecting the influence of the college on the lake shore.  Among the
+well-to-do girls, and also among those who could less well afford it,
+there was much elaborate dressing.  Dancing parties were weekly
+occurrences.  They were attended by first year girls of fourteen and
+fifteen as well as by the older girls, each lass with an attendant lad,
+who called for her and took her home unchaperoned.
+
+It took several months for Lydia to become aware of the complicated
+social life going on about her.  She was so absorbed while in school in
+adjusting herself to the new type of school life,--a different teacher
+for each study, heavier lessons, the responsibility of collateral
+reading--that the Christmas holidays came before she realized that
+except in her class room work, she had nothing whatever in common with
+her classmates.
+
+All fall she saw very little of Kent.  He was on the freshman football
+squad and this was a perfectly satisfactory explanation of his
+dereliction--had he cared to make any--as far as Saturdays went.  In
+the Assembly room because he had chosen the Classical course, his seat
+was far from Lydia's, who had chosen the English course.
+
+Saturday was a busy day for Lydia at home.  Old Lizzie, who was nearing
+sixty, was much troubled with rheumatism and even careless Lydia felt
+vaguely that the house needed a certain amount of cleaning once a week.
+So, of a Saturday morning, she slammed through the house like a small
+whirlwind, leaving corners undisturbed and dust in windrows, but
+satisfied with her efforts.  Saturday afternoon, she worked in the
+garden when the day was fair, helping to gather the winter vegetables.
+Before little Patience's death she had gone to Sunday School, but since
+that time she had not entered a church.  So Sunday became her feast
+day.  She put in the entire morning preparing a Sunday dinner for her
+father and nearly always John Levine.  After dinner, the three, with
+Adam, would tramp a mile up the road, stopping to lean over the bars
+and talk dairying with Pa Norton, winter wheat with Farmer Jansen, and
+hardy alfalfa with old Schmidt.  Between farms, Amos and John always
+talked politics, local and national, arguing heatedly.
+
+To all this, Lydia listened with half an ear.  She loved these walks,
+partly because of the grown up talks, partly because Adam loved them,
+mostly because of the beauty of the wooded hills, the far stretch of
+the black fields, ready plowed for spring and the pale, tender blue of
+the sky that touched the near horizon.  If she missed and needed
+playmates of her own age, she was scarcely conscious of the fact.
+
+Christmas came and went, sadly and quietly.  Lydia was glad when the
+holidays were over and she was back in school again.  On her desk that
+first morning lay a tiny envelope, addressed to her.  She opened it.
+In it was an invitation from Miss Towne to attend a reception she was
+tendering to the members of her Algebra and Geometry classes, freshmen
+and seniors.
+
+For a moment Lydia was in heaven.  It was her first formal invitation
+of any kind.  Then she came rapidly to earth.  She had nothing to wear!
+It was an evening party and she had no way to go or come.  She put the
+precious card in her blouse pocket and soberly opened her Civil
+Government.
+
+At recess, she sat alone as she was rather prone to do, in the window
+of the cloak room, when she heard a group of girls chattering.
+
+"Who wants to go to grouchy old Towne's reception when you can go to a
+dance?  I've got two bids to the Phi Pi's party," said a
+fourteen-year-old miss.
+
+"Oh, we'll have to go or she'll flunk us in Algebra," said another
+girl.  "I'll wear my pink silk organdy.  What'll you wear?"
+
+"My red silk.  Maybe she'll let us dance.  I suppose Charlie and
+Kent'll both want to take me."
+
+"Terrible thing to be popular!  Hasn't Kent the sweetest eyes!  Do you
+know what he said to me the other night at the Evans' party?"
+
+The girls drifted out of the cloak room.  Lydia sat  rigid.  Pink
+organdy!  Red  silk!  Kent's "sweetest eyes"!  Then she looked down at
+the inevitable sailor suit, and at her patched and broken shoes.  So
+far she had had few pangs about her clothes.  But now for the first
+time she realized that for some reason, she was an alien, different
+from the other girls--and the realization made her heart ache.
+
+The bell rang and she went to her recitation.  It was in Civil
+Government.  Lydia sat down dejectedly next to Charlie Jackson, the
+splendid, swarthy Indian boy of sixteen.
+
+"Did you learn the preamble?" he whispered to Lydia.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"He didn't say we had to," Charlie went on, "but I like the sound of
+it, so I did."
+
+The rest of the class filed in, thirty youngsters of fourteen or
+fifteen, the boys surreptitiously shoving and kicking each other, the
+girls giggling and rearranging their hair.  Mr. James rapped on his
+desk, and called on young Hansen.
+
+"Can you give the preamble to the Constitution?" he asked, cheerfully.
+
+The boy's jaw dropped.  "You never told us to learn it," he said.
+
+"No, I merely suggested that as Americans, you ought to learn it.  I
+talked to you during most of yesterday's period about it.  I wondered
+if you were old enough to take suggestions and not be driven through
+your books.  Miss Olson?"
+
+Miss Olson, whose hair was done in the latest mode, tossed her head
+pertly.
+
+"I was too busy to learn anything extra."
+
+Mr. James' eyebrows went up.  "A dance last night, I suppose."  He
+continued with his query half way round the class, then paused with a
+sigh.  "Has any one in the class learned it?"
+
+A muscular brown hand shot up, boldly.  A thin white one timidly
+followed.
+
+"Ah!"  Mr. James' face brightened.  "Miss Dudley, try it."
+
+Lydia clutched the back of the seat before her and began timidly.  Then
+the dignity and somewhat of the significance of the words touched her
+and her voice became rich and full.
+
+"'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect
+union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the
+common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of
+liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this
+Constitution for the United States of America.'"
+
+"Good.  Try it, Mr. Jackson."
+
+The young Indian rose and began.  "We, the people of the United
+States--"  He too was letter perfect.
+
+After he was seated, the teacher, a gray-haired, stern-faced man,
+looked at the two attentively.
+
+"Miss Dudley," he said finally, "does the preamble _mean_ anything to
+you?"
+
+Lydia's round childish eyes regarded him steadfastly.  "Two of my
+ancestors were delegates to the first Convention," she said
+hesitatingly.  "One of 'em lived in a log farmhouse with loop holes in
+it.  They used to shoot Indians--" she paused and looked at Charlie
+Jackson, then went on.  "I--I like the sound of the words."
+
+The teacher nodded.  "And you, Jackson?"
+
+The boy scowled.  "I know the words are lies as far as Indians are
+concerned.  And I know they needn't have been if whites weren't natural
+hogs.  Anyhow, I'm the only real American in the class."
+
+Lydia looked up at the brown face eagerly, questioningly.  Mr. James
+nodded.  "Quite right, Jackson."
+
+Young Hansen spoke up.  "We're all Americans.  What's he giving us?"
+
+"Has your father been naturalized, Hansen?" asked the teacher.
+
+The Norwegian boy shook his head, shamefacedly.
+
+"And were you born in this country?"
+
+"I was a baby when they came over."
+
+"Well then, are you an American, or aren't you?  You don't really know,
+do you?  And you haven't enough interest in the country you've lived in
+fourteen years to find out--or to know what was the impulse that gave
+birth to our laws, the thing that makes an American different from a
+Norwegian, for instance.  The two people in the class who needed the
+preamble least are the ones that have learned it.  I'm disappointed.
+We'll go on to the lesson.  Reisenweber, what is a demesne?"
+
+Lydia sat looking from the teacher's face to Charlie Jackson, and from
+Charlie to the blond faces of the other pupils.  Vague wonderments were
+stirring in her mind; the beginnings of thoughts she never had had
+before.  Tramping home that night through the snowy road she had a new
+set of thoughts.  What had made her stiffen and at the same time feel
+sorry and ashamed when Charlie Jackson had said the Preamble was a lie
+for Indians!  And could she, could she possibly in the two weeks before
+Miss Towne's reception make herself a dress that would be presentable?
+
+Adam, slavering and slobbering, was waiting for her as usual by the
+front gate.  His deep brown eyes always showed phosphorescent glimmers
+of excitement when Lydia came.  He lunged up against her now with howls
+of delight and she knelt in the snow, as she always did, and hugged
+him.  Then he seized her book strap and lugged her Algebra and English
+Composition up to the house.
+
+Lizzie was as excited as Lydia when she heard of the invitation.
+
+"There's that gray serge of your mother's," she said.  "It's awful
+faded.  And there's a piece of a light blue serge waist she had, Lydia,
+let's get 'em dyed red.  Smitzky's will do it in a couple of days for
+us.  They did lots of work for me in bygone days and I'll pay for it
+out of the grocery money."
+
+"Do you think we can fix it so it won't look made over?" asked Lydia,
+torn between hope and doubt.
+
+"Of course we can.  You choose your pattern tomorrow and I'll get in to
+town in the morning with the goods, rheumatiz or no rheumatiz."
+
+Amos heard of the invitation with real pleasure.  Nor did the clothes
+problem trouble him.  "Pshaw, wear that green Sunday dress of yours.
+You always look nice, Lydia; whatever you wear.  And I'll take you up
+there and call for you.  If all the boys in school was running after
+you, I wouldn't let one of 'em beau you round before you was eighteen.
+So put that kind of a bee out of your bonnet for good and all."
+
+Lydia lived the next two weeks in the clouds.  The new-old dress was
+finished the day before the reception.  There had been minutes of
+despair in creating this festive garment.  The dyeing process had
+developed unsuspected moth holes.  The blue and the gray serge did not
+dye exactly the same shade, nor were they of quite the same texture.
+However, by twisting and turning and adding a yoke of black silk, which
+had for years been Lizzie's Sunday neck scarf, a result was produced
+that completely satisfied the little dressmaker and old Lizzie.
+
+Miss Towne was the only daughter of one of the old New England families
+of Lake City.  Teaching was an avocation with her and not a bread and
+butter necessity.  She lived in one of the fine old stone houses that
+crowned the lake shore near the college.  At eight o'clock on a
+Saturday evening, Amos left Lydia at the front door of the house, and
+in a few minutes Lydia was taking off her hat and coat in the midst of
+a chattering group of girls.  The pink organdy was there as well as the
+red silk,--so were blue organdies and white, as well as dainty slippers.
+
+After a general "Hello," Lydia slipped downstairs to find her hostess.
+Miss Towne, the grouchy, the strict and the stern Miss Towne, moving
+among her guests, saw the thin little figure hesitating in the doorway,
+saw the cobbled red dress, with skirt that was too short and sleeves
+that were too long and neck that was too tight, saw the carefully
+blacked school shoes, saw the intelligent high bred head nobly set on
+straight shoulders and the wonderful dusty gold of the curly hair, and
+the puzzled, bashful blue eyes.
+
+"Oh, Lydia!" cried the grouchy Miss Towne, "weren't you a dear to come
+clear into town for my party.  Mother---" this clearly for all the
+children to hear, "this is the pupil I've told you of, the one of whom
+we're all so proud.  Come over here, Lydia."
+
+Lydia moved carefully.  Her most moth eaten breadth was at the back and
+it was difficult to cross the room without unduly exposing that back.
+But she reached the safe haven of Miss Towne's side before the bevy of
+multi-colored organdies entered the room.
+
+Kent was there.  He had brought the pink organdy.  He waved a gay hand
+to Lydia, who waved back, gaily too.  Her cheeks were beginning to burn
+scarlet, partly because a real party was a wonderful thing and partly
+because of the multi-colored organdies.  Charlie Jackson was there.  He
+lived with Dr. Fulton as office boy and general helper and the doctor
+was clothing and educating him.  Charlie was half-back of the school
+football team, a famous player and a great favorite.  The girls flirted
+with him.  The boys were jealous of his favor.  Even in the snob-ridden
+High School there was here a hangover of the pure democracy of
+childhood.
+
+Miss Towne had provided games and refreshments bountifully.  The
+elocution teacher recited some monologues and the music teacher sang.
+But it was a difficult matter to entertain these youngsters already
+accustomed to a grown up social life.  Miss Towne had declared that
+there should be no dancing.  But the games were neglected and the
+guests stood about in frankly bored groups.  So when a bevy of
+organdies begged for permission to dance, Miss Towne, with obvious
+reluctance, gave in.
+
+From that moment, the party was an assured success.  Lydia, who had
+stuck like a little burr at Miss Towne's side all the evening, looked
+on with wonder and a growing lump in her throat.
+
+"Don't you dance, my dear?" asked Mrs. Towne.
+
+"Of course she doesn't, Mother," answered Miss Towne, "she's just a
+child.  There's time enough for those things after High School.  I
+don't know what's going to become of this generation."
+
+This was small comfort to Lydia, watching the pretty groups twirl by.
+
+Kent, hugging the pink organdy, stopped on the far side of the room
+from Lydia to get a drink of lemonade.
+
+"Isn't Lydia's dress a scream," said Olga.
+
+"Huh?" asked Kent in surprise.  He followed his partner's glance across
+the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE COOKING CLASS
+
+
+"We pines have been useful to man and so he has destroyed us."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia with parted lips and big, wistful eyes stood quietly beside Miss
+Towne.
+
+"What you giving us," said Kent.  "Red's my favorite color."
+
+"Red's all right," Olga tossed her head, "but that dress!  She ought to
+know better.  A five cent cheese cloth would have been better'n that."
+
+Kent was truly enamored of pretty Olga but he looked at her angrily.
+
+"You girls make me sick," he grunted and started dodging among the
+dancers, across the room to Lydia's side.  Olga stood pouting.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Charlie Jackson.
+
+"Oh, I just said Lydia's dress was a fright and Kent went off mad."
+
+Charlie in turn stared at Lydia.
+
+Kent in the meantime was grinning at Lydia amiably.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!  Want to dance?"
+
+"I can't.  Don't know how," replied Lydia, despondently.
+
+"Easy as anything.  Come on, I'll teach you."
+
+Lydia seized Kent's lapel with fingers that would tremble slightly.
+"Kent, I dassn't stir.  My back breadth don't match and my skirt hangs
+awful."
+
+"Oh, shucks!" replied Kent, angrily, "you girls are all alike.  Red's
+my favorite color."
+
+"Mine too," said Charlie Jackson at his elbow.  "What're you two
+arguing about?"
+
+"Her dress," growled Kent, "I don't see anything the matter with it, do
+you?"
+
+"Nope, and it's on the prettiest girl in the room too, eh, Kent?"
+
+"You bet," returned Kent, believing, though, that he lied, for Olga was
+as pretty as a tea rose.
+
+Lydia blushed and gasped.
+
+"If you won't dance, come on over and have some lemonade," suggested
+Kent.
+
+"If I sit in the window, will you bring me a glass?" asked Lydia, still
+mindful of the back breadth.
+
+"You take her to the window and I'll get the lemo, Kent," said Charlie.
+
+Kent led the way to the window-seat.  "You're a good old sport, Lyd,"
+he said.  "Charlie'll look out for you.  I gotta get back to Olga."
+
+he returned to make peace with the pink organdy.  She was very lovely
+and Kent was having his first flirtation.  Yet before he went to sleep
+that night the last picture that floated before his eyes was of a thin
+little figure with worn mittens clasped over patched knees and a
+ravished child's face looking into his.
+
+Charlie Jackson sat out two whole dances with Lydia.  Their talk was of
+Adam and of fishing.  Lydia longed to talk about Indians with him but
+didn't dare.  Promptly at ten, Amos appeared at the front door.
+
+Lydia's first party was over.  Amos and old Lizzie were charmed with
+Lydia's description of it and were sure she had had a wonderful time.
+But Lydia felt that the dress had made of the party a hideous failure.
+She knew now that she was marked among her mates as a poverty stricken
+little dowd whom popular boys like Kent and Charlie pitied.
+
+And yet because life is as kind to us as we have the intelligence to
+let it be, it was out of the party that grew slowly a new resolve of
+Lydia's--to have some day as pretty hands and as well shod feet as Olga
+and Hilda and Cissy, to learn how to make her dresses so that even the
+composing of an organdy might not be beyond her.
+
+They saw less of John Levine during the late winter and early spring.
+He was running for sheriff on the Republican ticket.  He was elected
+early in April by a comfortable majority and invited Amos and Lydia to
+a fine Sunday dinner in celebration at the best hotel in town.  Kent's
+father in April was promoted from a minor position in the office of the
+plow factory to the secretaryship of the company.  The family
+immediately moved to a better house over on the lake shore and it
+seemed to Lydia that Kent moved too, out of her life.
+
+She missed him less than might have been expected.  Her life was so
+different from that of any of the children that she knew, that growing
+into adolescence with the old bond of play disappearing, she fell back
+more and more on resources within herself.  This did not prevent her
+going faithfully once a month to call on Margery Marshall.  And these
+visits were rather pleasant than otherwise.  Margery was going through
+the paper doll fever.  Lydia always brought Florence Dombey with her
+and the two girls carried on an elaborate game of make-believe, the
+intricacies of which were entirely too much for Elviry Marshall,
+sitting within earshot.
+
+Elviry Marshall had two consuming passions in life--Margery and gossip.
+The questions she asked always irritated Lydia vaguely.
+
+"What wages is your Pa getting now, Lydia?"
+
+"Just the same, Mrs. Marshall."
+
+"Don't you pay Lizzie anything yet?"
+
+"No, Ma'am."
+
+"How much is your grocery bill this month?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Does your Pa ever talk about getting married again?"
+
+"No, Ma'am!  Oh, no, Ma'am!"
+
+Lizzie almost exploded with anger when Lydia retailed these questions,
+but Amos only laughed.
+
+"Pshaw, you know Elviry!"
+
+"Yes, I know Elviry!  She's a snake in the grass.  Always was and
+always will be."
+
+"She's a dandy housekeeper," murmured Lydia.  "I wonder where she
+learned.  And she isn't teaching Margery a thing.  I like Mr. Marshall."
+
+"Dave's a miser.  He always was and he always will be," snapped Lizzie.
+"I despise the whole kit and biling of them, money or no money.  Dave
+never earned an honest cent in his life."
+
+"Lots of rich men haven't," replied Amos.
+
+Amos' garden was a thing of beauty.  Its trim rows of vegetables were
+bordered with sunflowers, whose yellow heads vied in height with the
+rustling ears of corn.  Amos had a general grudge toward life.  He had
+a vague, unexpressed belief that because he was a descendant of the
+founders of the country, the world owed him an easy living.  He had a
+general sense of superiority to his foreign born neighbors and to the
+workmen in the plow factory.
+
+But in his garden, all his grudges disappeared.  Every evening until
+dark and every Sunday he worked away, whistling softly to himself.  He
+always felt nearer to his wife, in the garden.  She too had been bred
+on a New England farm.  He always felt as if the fine orderliness of
+the rows was for her.
+
+Lydia greatly preferred weeding the garden to cleaning the house.
+Indeed the contrast between the fine garden, the well kept patch of
+lawn and the disorderly house was startling.  Amos grumbled and
+complained but Lydia was in the hobble-de-hoy stage--she didn't care
+and she had no one teach her.
+
+One afternoon in August, clad in her bathing suit, now much too small
+for her, she was working in the garden, when a voice behind her grunted,
+
+"Eat!"
+
+Lydia jumped and turned.  The old squaw of two years before stood
+begging.  She was as pitifully thin as ever.  As she stared at the ugly
+old Indian, Lydia's throat tightened.  She seemed to feel baby
+Patience's fingers clinging to hers in fear.
+
+"Want some vegetables?" she asked, motioning toward the garden.
+
+The squaw nodded eagerly and held up the dirty apron she was wearing.
+Lydia began slowly to fill it, talking as she worked.
+
+"Where do you live?" she asked.
+
+The Indian jerked her gray head toward the north.  "Big Woods."'
+
+"But that's twenty miles.  It must take you a long time to walk it.
+Poor thing!"
+
+The squaw shrugged her shoulders.  Lydia stared at the toothless,
+trembling old mouth, hideous with wrinkles, then at the gnarled and
+shaking old hands.
+
+"Haven't you any one to take care of you?"
+
+"All sick--boy sick--man sick--girl sick.  All time sick, all time
+nothing to eat."
+
+"But won't some other Indian make you a garden, a little one?"
+
+Again the squaw shrugged her shoulders.  Her apron was full now.  She
+produced a string from inside her waist and tying the apron up
+bag-like, she slung it over her shoulder.  Then she gave Lydia a keen
+glance.
+
+"Friend," she said, briefly, and turning, she tottered painfully out of
+the gate.
+
+Followed by Adam, Lydia walked thoughtfully out upon the little pier
+Amos had built.  They had no boat, but Lydia fished and dived from the
+pier.  It was hard to understand how the Indians with all their rich
+pine land could be so poor.  She resolved to ask her father and Levine
+about it and turned a somersault into the water.  She swam about until
+tired, then turned over on her back to rest.  Lying so a shadow drifted
+across her face and she raised her head.  A gray birch bark canoe
+floated silently beside her.  In it, in a gray bathing suit, sat
+Charlie Jackson.
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia.  "How in the world you do it so quietly, I
+don't see."
+
+"I saw something that looked like a wet yellow pup in the water, and
+stole up on it," grinned Charlie.
+
+"Come on in.  It's as warm as suds."
+
+Charlie shot his canoe to the pier and in a moment, was floating beside
+Lydia.  She took a deep breath, let herself sink and a moment or two
+later came up several yards beyond him.  He did not miss her for a
+moment, then he started for her with a shout.  A game of tag followed
+ending in a wild race to the pier which they reached neck and neck.
+Adam wept and slobbered with joy over their return.
+
+"You certainly are a little sunfish in the water," panted Charlie, as
+they sat with feet dangling off the pier.
+
+"Ought to be, I'm in it enough," returned Lydia.  "Charlie, there's a
+poor old squaw came here to-day.  What's the matter with the Indians?
+Why don't they work?"
+
+Charlie turned to look at the white child, uneasily.  The two made a
+wonderful contrast.  Charlie was big and bronze and deep chested, with
+regular features although they were a little heavy.  Lydia, growing
+fast, was thinner than ever but cheeks and eyes were bright.
+
+Charlie's mouth twisted in a sneer.  "Why don't they work?  Why don't
+the whites give 'em a chance?  Dirty thieves, prowling round like
+timber wolves.  Ask Dave Marshall.  Ask that gumshoeing crook of a
+Levine.  Don't ask me."
+
+"Levine's not a crook," shouted Lydia.  "He's my friend."
+
+The sneer left Charlie's face and he laughed.  "Your friend is he,
+little sunfish!"
+
+"Yes," said Lydia, furiously.  "He gave me Adam," hugging the dog's
+ugly, faithful head.  He immediately tried to sit in her wet lap.  "And
+he's done as much for me as my own father."
+
+"If he's your friend," said the Indian gently, "I won't speak against
+him to you again."
+
+Lydia instantly was mollified.  Charlie was so old and so young!  He
+was so different from Kent that staring into his deep black eyes, Lydia
+suddenly felt his alien race.
+
+"I must go in and dress," she said.  "It's time to get supper."
+
+Charlie nodded and untied his canoe.  After he was seated with paddle
+lifted, he glanced up at her mischievously.
+
+"You're a very nice little girl," he said; "I shall come again.  You
+may call me Uncle Charlie."
+
+Lydia put out her tongue at him.  "Good-by, Uncle!" she called and
+raced up the bank to the house.
+
+"Daddy," she said that night at supper, "why should Mr. Marshall and
+Charlie Jackson both say Mr. Levine is a crook?"
+
+Amos ate a piece of bread meditatively before replying.  "Any man that
+goes into politics in this country leaves his reputation behind him.
+You and I'll never have a better friend than John Levine."
+
+Lydia nodded.  She was only a child after all and still retained
+implicit faith in the opinion of those she loved.  She went back to
+school that fall full of interest and importance.  She was a sophomore
+now and very proud of the fact that she knew the ropes.  Her
+arrangement with Billy held for his second year books.  With much
+pinching of the grocery money, Lizzie had achieved two new galatea
+sailor suits and so while she felt infinitely inferior to the
+elaborately gowned young misses of her grade, Lydia was not unhappy.
+
+There was a new course of study offered the pupils this year.  It was
+called the Cookery Course and was elective, not required.  Lydia turned
+her small nose up at it.  She was a good cook, without study, she told
+herself.  But Miss Towne thought differently.  She called Lydia into
+her room one day, early in the term.  "Lydia, why don't you take the
+Cooking Course?"
+
+"I can cook, Miss Towne.  I do all our cooking and Daddy says I'm fine
+at it."
+
+"I know, my dear, but there are other things connected with the Course
+that you need."
+
+"What things?" asked Lydia, a trine obstinately.
+
+"That's what I want you to find out for yourself.  Come, Lydia, take my
+word for it.  It's only two hours a week and no outside study required.
+If after a term of it, you still think it's useless, why drop it."
+
+So behold Lydia entered in the Cooking Course which was not popular.
+The mothers of the majority of the girls did not, they said, send their
+daughters to school to be taught kitchen service.  But by the efforts
+of Miss Towne and one or two other teachers, a dozen children ranging
+in age from fourteen to eighteen, with Lydia as the infant of the
+class, were enticed into the bright model kitchen in the basement.
+
+It was not long after this that Lydia said to her father, one evening,
+
+"Daddy, I've got to have twenty-five cents."
+
+Amos looked up from his newspaper.  "What for, Lydia?  A quarter's a
+good deal of money.  Takes me pretty near two hours to earn it."
+
+"I know it," answered Lydia, wincing, "but I've got to buy a nail file.
+You ought to see my hands compared with the other girls.  And you ought
+to see dirty finger nails under the microscope.  The cooking school
+teacher showed us before we made bread, today."
+
+Amos looked at Lydia thoughtfully for a moment, then he carefully
+abstracted a quarter from his pocket, laid it on the table and went
+back to his reading.
+
+Lydia planned a real feast for Thanksgiving.  She negotiated with Billy
+Norton for the exchange of two pounds of fudge for a brace of wild
+duck.  The Saturday before Thanksgiving, she gave the house its usual
+"lick and promise" and then started out with her skates to enjoy the
+first ice of the season.
+
+She had a glorious morning.  There was no snow and the lake had frozen
+crystal clear.  The air was breathless.  As she skated she chanted, to
+improvised tunes, bits of verse.
+
+  "The stag at eve had drunk his fill
+  Where danced the moon on Monan's rill
+  And deep his midnight lair had laid
+  In lone Glenartney's hazel shade.
+
+  "I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris and he,
+  I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.
+  'Good speed!' cried the watch as the gate bolts undrew,
+  'Speed' echoed the wall to us galloping through."
+
+She hunted through Scottish mountains and moors, she whirled from Ghent
+to Aix and still high hearted and in the land of visions, took off her
+skates and entered the house.  She banged the door, then stood for a
+moment staring.  Elviry and Margery were seated before the living-room
+stove, while old Lizzie sat on one edge of Amos' arm chair eyeing the
+two belligerently.
+
+Margery was wearing a new fur coat.  Her beautiful black eyes looked
+out from under a saucy fur-trimmed hat with a scarlet quill on the
+side.  Elviry wore black broadcloth with fox collar and muff.  Lydia,
+in a remodeled coat of her mother's, and her old Tam and mended
+mittens, recovered from her surprise quickly.
+
+"Hello!" she said.  "When did you come?  This is the first time you've
+ever been in our house, Mrs. Marshall, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," replied Elviry, "and," with a glance at Lizzie, "I wouldn't be
+here now if Mr. Marshall hadn't made me."
+
+"Oh, Mamma," protested Margery, "I wanted to come."
+
+"You hush up, Margery!  What I came for is that Mr. Marshall would like
+to have the three of you come to our house for Thanksgiving dinner."
+
+Lydia suddenly giggled.  "Don't worry, Mrs. Marshall, we can't come.
+We're going to have company ourselves for Thanksgiving."
+
+Elviry gave a huge sigh of relief.  "Well, that's too bad," she said.
+"We're going to have a grand dinner, too."
+
+"So are we," retorted Lydia.
+
+"How's Florence Dombey?" asked Margery.  "Mamma, can't I stay and play
+with Lydia a while?"
+
+"We'll stay a few minutes," said Elviry, loosing her furs and settling
+back in her chair.  "It's a real small place, Lizzie, but you can do so
+little work now, I s'pose it's just as well."
+
+Lydia had produced a pasteboard shoe box of paper dolls which she gave
+to Margery.  She cuddled Florence Dombey in her arms and gave one ear
+to Margery's question as to the names and personalities of the paper
+dolls, the other to Elviry's comments.
+
+"It ain't so small," sniffed Lizzie.  "It's bigger'n anything you ever
+lived in, Elviry, till Dave sold enough lumber he stole from the
+Government to start a bank."
+
+Elviry was not to be drawn into a quarrel.  "You always was a jealous
+body, Lizzie.  That old mahogany belonged to both Amos and his wife's
+folks, I've heard.  Why don't you get rid of it and buy more of this
+here new Mission stuff that's coming in?  Though I suppose you'd better
+wait till Lydia's old enough to take more interest in keeping the house
+clean.  Butter's awful high this winter.  How much does your grocery
+bill average, Lizzie?"
+
+"None of your business," replied Lizzie.
+
+"I don't think Imogen is as good looking as Marion.  I'd rather have
+Marion marry Prince Rupert, then these can be their children," Margery
+murmured on.
+
+"Land, Lizzie, don't be so cross," said Elviry.  "I suppose you've
+heard the talk about John Levine?  He's getting in with that half breed
+crowd up on the reservation that the Indian agent's such friends with.
+They say Levine's land hungry enough to marry a squaw.  He's so dark, I
+wouldn't be surprised if he had Indian blood himself.  Land knows
+nothing would surprise me about him.  They say he's just naturally
+crooked."
+
+Lydia and Florence Dombey suddenly stood in front of Elviry.
+
+"Don't you say such things about Mr. Levine," said Lydia slowly, cheeks
+bright, eyes as blue as Florence Dombey's.
+
+"Well!" exclaimed Elviry, beginning to pull her furs up, "I don't seem
+to be able to please you two with my conversation, so I'll be going.
+Margery, get up off that dirty floor.  I never cared much about Amos'
+wife, she was too proud, but at least she was clean.  She'd turn over
+in her grave if she knew what this house looked like.  Come, Margery,
+the horse will be cold, standing so long."
+
+Lizzie opened her mouth to speak but Lydia shook her head, and the two
+stood in silence, watching the departure of the visitors.  When the
+door had closed Lizzie burst forth in an angry tirade, but Lydia only
+half listened.  She looked slowly around the living-room, then walked
+into the dining-room and thence into the kitchen.  She opened the
+pantry door and stared at the dust and disorder, the remnants of food,
+the half washed dishes.  Suddenly she thought of the shining and
+orderly kitchen in the High School basement.  Supposing the cooking
+teacher should come out to supper, sometime!  Lydia had asked her to
+come.
+
+She came slowly back into the living-room.  Old Lizzie was replenishing
+the stove, still muttering to herself.  Lydia observed for the first
+time that her apron was dirty.  Thinking it over, she could not recall
+ever having seen Lizzie with a clean apron.  A deep sense of shame
+suddenly enveloped Lydia.
+
+"Oh, I wish some one had taught me," she groaned.  "I wish mother had
+lived.  Everybody has to go and die on me!  I suppose Lizzie and Dad'll
+be next.  Adam helps to keep the house dirty.  There's dog hair
+everywhere."
+
+"Don't you get worked up over Elviry Marshall, child," said Lizzie.
+
+"I hate her," exclaimed Lydia, "but what she said about the house is
+true.  Anyhow, I've learned how to clean pantry shelves, so here goes."
+
+She tied one of Lizzie's aprons round her neck, pushed a chair into the
+pantry and began her unsavory task.  It was dusk when she finished and
+led Lizzie out to observe the shiny, sweet smelling orderliness of the
+place.
+
+"Land, it does make a difference!  If the rheumatiz didn't take all the
+ambition out of me, I'd keep it that way for you," said the old lady.
+
+"I'll do it, every Saturday.  Gosh, I'm tired!" groaned Lydia, throwing
+herself on the living-room couch.  "Lizzie, give me some of your mutton
+tallow to rub on my hands.  The cooking teacher says it's fine for
+hands."
+
+Lydia lay in the twilight, watching the coals glow in the base burner,
+while the aroma of the baked beans and brown bread Lizzie was tending
+in the kitchen floated in to her.  Adam lay on the floor by the stove,
+where he could keep one drowsy eye on her every motion.  She was
+thinking of her mother and of little Patience.  She could think of them
+now without beginning to tremble.  She tried to picture every detail of
+her mother's face.  They had no picture of her nor of the baby, and
+Lydia was afraid she would forget.  She wondered if they were together,
+if they knew how hard she was trying to obey her mother's injunction to
+"make something" of herself.  "Be a lady!"  "Never be coarse."  There
+was nobody to show her things, she thought.  How could she ever learn
+to be a lady?  "If I believed in praying any more, I'd pray about lots
+of things," she thought, sadly.  "But either there isn't any God, or
+else He don't believe in prayer, Himself.  Gee, supper smells good.
+I'm awful hungry.  I wonder why Mrs. Marshall hates me so.  I suppose
+because I'm such a common kid and she still thinks I almost drowned
+Margery.  And I don't believe a word she says about Mr. Levine, either.
+Hateful old beast!  If I believed in prayer, you bet I'd tell God a few
+things about her."
+
+The highly satisfactory Thanksgiving feast was eaten and praised.  The
+dishes were washed and set away in the immaculate pantry, and Amos and
+John Levine were smoking by the fire.
+
+"Seems to me this room looks all slicked up," said Levine.
+
+Amos nodded.  "Lydia's coming along.  Says the cooking school teacher
+told her to sprinkle wet tea leaves over the carpet before sweeping to
+keep down the dust.  Place was like a cyclone this morning for an hour,
+but the result pays.  She's growing like her mother."
+
+"She's only a child, and small for her age, at that," said John.  "It's
+a shame for her to work so hard."
+
+"I know it," answered Amos, "but what can I do?  On a dollar and a half
+a day--I swan--"
+
+There was a rap on the door.  Lizzie admitted Dave Marshall and Margery.
+
+"Out for a tramp as a digester," explained Dave.  "Came to call on my
+friend Lydia.  I ain't seen her for ages."
+
+He and Levine nodded to each other.  Amos shook hands and Dave kissed
+Lydia, catching a dark scowl on Levine's face as he did so.
+
+"Let's play paper dolls," said Margery, as soon as she had pulled off
+her coat.
+
+"You play 'em," replied Lydia, "I'm awful tired."
+
+"Why should a baby like you be tired?" inquired Marshall, pulling her
+to his side as he seated himself in Amos' arm chair.
+
+"If you'd tasted our dinner," said Amos, "you'd know why she and Lizzie
+should be half dead."
+
+"I wish I could 'a' tasted it," replied Marshall.  "Have a smoke,
+friends?"
+
+Amos took a cigar but Levine refused.
+
+"Come, John, come," said the stout banker, banteringly.  "This is a
+legal holiday and you and I at least agree on Lydia.  Let's stop war
+for the day, eh?"
+
+Levine's sallow face hardened, then he caught Lydia's blue gaze on him
+as she stood beside Marshall.  It was such a transparent, trusting
+gaze, so full of affection, so obviously appealing to him to "be nice,"
+that in spite of himself he grinned and took a cigar.
+
+Amos settled back with a sigh of satisfaction.  He enjoyed company and
+had had no one but John since his wife's death.
+
+"Looks as if the country'd go Republican next fall," he said by way of
+starting a conversation.
+
+"I don't see why," returned Marshall, who was a Democrat.
+
+"Folks are sick of Democratic graft," said Levine.
+
+"And Republicans think it's their turn, eh?" inquired Marshall.  "Well,
+maybe it is, maybe it is!"
+
+Amos laughed genially.  "Satisfied with your share, Dave?"
+
+"Got my eye on just one more little mite.  Just one little mite, then
+I'm through," chuckled Marshall.
+
+"Then you good Republicans can get your feet into the trough."
+
+"Co-ee!  Lydia!" came a call from the lake shore.
+
+Lydia ran to the kitchen door.  Charlie Jackson and Kent were skating
+up to the bank.
+
+"Come out for a while," cried Kent.
+
+"I can't.  I've got company.  Come on up and get warm," returned Lydia.
+
+The two boys slipped off their skates and came up to the cottage.  Kent
+needed no introduction, and Lydia made short work of Charlie by saying
+to the assemblage at large, "This is Charlie Jackson.  Come on up by
+the stove, boys."
+
+The boys established themselves on the couch back of the baseburner.
+
+"Hello, Marg," said Kent.  "What you doing?"
+
+"Paper dolls," returned Margery from her corner, without looking up.
+Charlie Jackson stared at the beautiful little black head bent over the
+bright colored bits of paper with interest.
+
+Amos took up the interrupted conversation.  "If we could get a
+Republican Congress, that block o' pine and black loam twenty miles
+north would be given to its rightful owners."
+
+"Meaning the full bloods, I suppose," said Levine with a short laugh.
+
+"Yes--full blooded whites," returned Amos.
+
+Charlie Jackson suddenly threw back his head and rose.
+
+"I'm a full blood Indian," he said, quietly.  The three men looked at
+him as if they saw him for the first time.
+
+"Well, what of it?" asked Marshall, shortly.
+
+"This of it," said Charlie, tensely, "that you whites with your
+Constitution and your Declaration of Independence are a lot of liars
+and thieves."
+
+Marshall turned purple, but John Levine spoke quickly.  "Easy there, my
+boy!  You're talking of things you don't understand."
+
+"Oh, but he does," interrupted Lydia eagerly.  "'Governments derive
+their just powers from the consent of the governed.'  We had it in
+school.  It must mean Indians too."
+
+John Levine laughed.  "There you have it.  And Charlie is right, we are
+liars and thieves, but we have to be.  Might is right in this world."
+
+"Speak for yourself, Levine," cried Marshall.
+
+"Levine!" exploded Charlie.  "Are you Levine?  You're the man then that
+my sister--" his voice rose to a shout.  "I'll beat the face off of you
+right now."
+
+And he made a sudden spring for the astonished Levine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE
+
+
+"Nature counts no day as wasted."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Amos and Kent caught Charlie by either arm as his hands clutched for
+Levine's throat.  Marshall did not stir out of his chair.  During the
+remainder of the episode his face wore a complacent expression that,
+though Lydia did not consciously observe it at the time, returned to
+her in after years with peculiar significance.
+
+"Here!  Here!  This won't do, my young Indian!" cried Amos.
+
+"Let me get at him!" panted Charlie.
+
+Lydia moved away from Lizzie and Margery.  The three had automatically
+jumped to grab Adam's collar for Adam always assisted in a fight, human
+or otherwise.  She ran over to the Indian.
+
+"Charlie," she pleaded, looking up into his face, "you mustn't hurt Mr.
+Levine.  He's my best friend.  And it is not polite to come to call at
+my house and make a row, this way."
+
+"That's right," commented Marshall.  "Do your fighting outdoors."
+
+John had not stirred from his chair.  He looked up at the Indian and
+said slowly and insolently, "Get out of here!  You know what I can do
+to you, don't you?  Well, get out before I do it!"
+
+Charlie returned John's look of contempt with one of concentrated
+hatred.  Then he turned to Kent.
+
+"Come on, Kent," he growled and followed by his friend, he marched out
+of the kitchen door.
+
+"Whew!" said Amos, "talk about civilizing Indians!"
+
+Lydia was trembling violently.  "What made him act so----  _Did_ you
+hurt his sister, Mr. Levine?"
+
+"Didn't even know he had a sister," returned John, coolly relighting
+his cigar.
+
+Marshall rose and stretched his fat body.  "Well, you serve up too much
+excitement for me, Amos.  I'll be getting along.  Come, Margery."
+
+"Wait and we'll all have some coffee," said Lizzie.  "Land, I'm all
+shook up."
+
+"Pshaw! 'twan't anything.  Kent should have had more sense than to
+bring him in here," said Levine.
+
+"Why, he's usually perfectly lovely," protested Lydia.  "Goes to
+parties with the girls and everything."
+
+"I wouldn't go to a party with a dirty Indian," said Margery, her nose
+up in the air.
+
+"What do you know about parties, chicken?" asked Marshall, buttoning
+her coat for her.
+
+"Mama says I can go next year when I enter High School," replied
+Margery.
+
+"First boy, white or Indian, that comes to call on you before you're
+eighteen, I'll turn the hose on," said Dave, winking at the men.
+
+Amos and John laughed and Dave made his exit in high good humor.
+
+When the door had closed Amos said, "Any real trouble with the boy,
+John?"
+
+"Shucks, no!" returned Levine.  "Forget it!"
+
+And forget it they did while the November dusk drew to a close and the
+red eyes of the stove blinked a warmer and warmer glow.  About eight
+o'clock, after a light supper, Levine started back for town.  He had
+not been gone five minutes when a shot cracked through the breathless
+night air.
+
+Amos started for the door but Lizzie grasped his arm.  "You stay right
+here, Amos, and take care of the house."
+
+"What do you s'pose it was?" whispered Lydia.  "I wish Mr. Levine was
+here.  He's sheriff."
+
+"That's what I'm afraid of--that something's happened, to him--between
+his being sheriff and his other interests.  I'll get my lantern."
+
+"Wait!  I'll have to fill it for you," said Lydia.
+
+So it was that while Amos fumed and Lydia sought vainly for a new wick,
+footsteps sounded on the porch, the door opened and Billy Norton and
+his father supported John Levine into the living-room.  Levine's
+overcoat showed a patch of red on the right breast.
+
+"For God's sake!  Here, put him on the couch," gasped Amos.
+
+"Billy, take Levine's bicycle and get the doctor here," said Pa Norton.
+
+"Hot water and clean cloth, Lydia," said Amos.  "Let's get his clothes
+off, Norton."
+
+"Don't touch me except to cut open my clothes and pack the wound with
+ice in a pad of rags," said John weakly.  Then he closed his eyes and
+did not speak again till the doctor came.
+
+Lydia trembling violently could scarcely carry the crushed ice from
+Lizzie to her father.  No one spoke until the gentle oozing of the
+blood yielded to the freezing process.  Then Amos said in a low voice
+to Pa Norton,
+
+"What happened?"
+
+"Can't say.  Billy and I were coming home from town when we heard the
+shot ahead of us.  It took us a minute or two to come up to Levine.  He
+was standing dazed like, said the shot had come from the lake shore way
+and that's all he knew about it."
+
+The beat of horses' hoofs on the frozen ground broke the silence that
+followed.  In a moment Dr. Fulton ran into the room.  Lydia seized
+Florence Dombey and hurried to the kitchen, nor did she leave her
+station in the furthest corner until the door closed softly after the
+doctor.  Amos came out into the kitchen and got a drink at the water
+pail.
+
+"Doc got the bullet," said Amos.  "Grazed the top of the lungs and came
+to the surface near the backbone.  Lord, that was a narrow escape!"
+
+"Will he--will he die?" whispered Lydia.
+
+"Of course not," answered Amos, with a quick glance at the blanched
+little face.  "He's got to have good nursing and he can't be moved.
+Lizzie's as good a nurse as any one could want.  Doctor'll be back at
+midnight and stay the rest of the night."
+
+"Who did it, Daddy?"
+
+Amos shook his head.  "It might have been Charlie Jackson or it might
+have been a dozen others.  A sheriff's liable to have plenty of
+enemies.  Billy started a bunch hunting."
+
+Lydia shivered.
+
+"Go to bed, child," said Amos.  "We're going to be busy in this house
+for a while."
+
+"I want to see him first, please, Daddy."
+
+"Just a peek then, don't make a noise."
+
+Already the living room had a sick room aspect.  The light was lowered
+and the table was littered with bandages and bottles.  Lydia crept up
+to the couch and stood looking down at the gaunt, quiet figure.
+
+John opened his eyes and smiled faintly.  "Making you lots of trouble,
+young Lydia."
+
+"Oh, no!" exclaimed Lydia.  "Just get well, we don't mind the trouble."
+
+"I've got to get well, so's you and I can travel," whispered Levine.
+"Good night, dear."
+
+Lydia swallowed a sob.  "Good night," she said.
+
+At first, Amos planned to have Lydia stay out of school to help, but
+Levine grew so feverishly anxious when he heard of this that the idea
+was quickly given up and Ma Norton and a neighbor farther up the road
+arranged to spend the days turn about, helping Lizzie.
+
+As soon as the shooting was known, there was a deluge of offers of
+help.  All the organizations to which Levine belonged as well as his
+numerous acquaintances were prodigal in their offers of every kind of
+assistance.
+
+But John fretfully refused.  He would have no nurse but Lizzie, share
+no roof but Amos'.  "You're the only folks I got," he told Amos again
+and again.
+
+The shooting was a seven days' wonder, but no clue was found as to the
+identity of the would-be assassin.  Charlie Jackson had spent the
+evening with Kent.  As the monotony of Levine's convalescence came on,
+gossip and conjecture lost interest in him.  John himself would not
+speak of the shooting.
+
+It was after Christmas before John was able to sit up in Amos' arm
+chair and once more take a serious interest in the world about him.
+Lydia, coming home from school, would find Adam howling with joy at the
+gate and John, pale and weak but fully dressed, watching for her from
+his arm chair by the window.  The two had many long talks, in the early
+winter dusk before Lydia started her preparations for supper.  One of
+these particularly, the child never forgot.
+
+"Everybody acted queer about Charlie Jackson, at first," said Lydia,
+"but now you're getting well, they're all just as crazy about him as
+ever."
+
+"He'll kill some one in a football scrimmage yet," was John's comment.
+
+"No, the boys say he never loses his temper.  The rest of them do.  I
+wish girls played football.  I bet I'd make a good quarterback."
+
+John laughed weakly but delightedly.  "You must weigh fully a hundred
+pounds!  Why, honey, they'd trample a hundred pounds to death!"
+
+"They would not!"  Lydia's voice was indignant.  "And just feel my
+muscles.  I get 'em from swimming."
+
+John ran his hand over the proffered shoulders and arm.  "My goodness,"
+he said in astonishment.  "Those muscles are like tiny steel springs.
+Well, what else would you like to be besides quarterback, Lydia?"
+
+"When I was a little girl I was crazy to be an African explorer.  And
+I'd still like to be, only I know that's not sensible.  Adam, for
+Pete's sake get off my feet."
+
+Adam gave a slobbery sigh and withdrew a fraction of an inch.  Levine
+watched Lydia in the soft glow of the lamp light.  Her hair was still
+the dusty yellow of babyhood but it was long enough now to hang in soft
+curls in her neck after she had tied it back with a ribbon.  She was
+still wearing the sailor suits, and her face was still thin and
+childish for all she was a sophomore.
+
+"I don't suppose you could explore," said Levine, meditatively.
+
+"Oh, I could, if I had the money to outfit with, but I'll tell you what
+I really would like best of all."  Lydia hitched her chair closer to
+Levine and glanced toward the kitchen where Lizzie was knitting and
+warming her feet in the oven.  "I'd like to own an orphan asylum.  And
+I'd get the money to run it with from a gold mine.  I would find a mine
+in New Mexico.  I know I could if I could just get out there."
+
+"Seems to me all your plans need money," suggested John.
+
+"Yes, that's the trouble with them," admitted Lydia, with a sigh.  "And
+I'll always be poor--I'm that kind."
+
+"What are you really going to do with yourself, Lydia, pipe dreams
+aside?"
+
+"Well, first I'm going to get an education, clear up through the
+University.  'Get an education if you have to scrub the streets to do
+it,' was what Mother always said.  'You can be a lady and be poor,' she
+said, 'but you can't be a lady and use poor English.'  And then I'm
+going to be as good a housekeeper as Mrs. Marshall and I'm going to
+dress as well as Olga Reinhardt, and have as pretty hands as Miss
+Towne.  And I'm never going to move out of the home I make.  Maybe I'll
+get married.  I suppose I'll have to 'cause I want at least six
+children, and some one's got to support them.  And I'll want to travel
+a good deal."
+
+"Travel takes money," John reminded her.
+
+"Not always.  There was The Man Without a Country, but I wouldn't want
+to have what he had.  Seems to me it was a little thing he said after
+all.  Mr. Levine, why did he feel so terrible about the poem?"
+
+"What poem?" asked Levine.
+
+Lydia cleared her throat.
+
+  "'Breathes there a man with soul so dead
+  Who never to himself hath said
+  This is my own, my native land?'
+
+--and you know the rest."
+
+John Levine looked at Lydia strangely.  There was a moment's pause,
+then she said, "But I don't understand just what it all means."
+
+"Lots of us don't," commented John, briefly.  "But if I had a son I'd
+beat understanding of it into him with a hickory club."
+
+Lydia's jaw dropped.  "But--but wouldn't you beat it into your
+daughter?"
+
+"What's the use of trying to teach patriotism to anything female?"
+There was a contemptuous note in Levine's voice that touched Lydia's
+temper.
+
+"Well, there's plenty of use, I'd have you know!" she cried.  "Why, I
+was more interested in Civil Government last year than any of the boys
+except Charlie Jackson."
+
+Levine laughed, then said soberly, "All right, Lydia, I'd be glad to
+see what you can do for your country.  When you get that orphan asylum,
+put over the door, 'Ducit Amor Patriae.'"
+
+Lydia looked at him clearly.  "You just wait and see."
+
+She went soberly toward the kitchen for her apron, and Levine looked
+after her with an expression at once wistful and gentle.  Lydia looked
+up "Ducit Amor Patriae" in a phrase book the next day.  She liked the
+sound of it.
+
+By the middle of January, Levine was sufficiently recovered to leave.
+The Saturday before he left occurred another conversation between him
+and Lydia that cemented still further the quaint friendship of the two.
+
+It snowed heavily all day.  Lydia had put in the morning as usual
+cleaning the house.  This was a very methodical and thorough process
+now, and when it was finished the cottage shone with cleanliness.  In
+the afternoon, she dug a path to the gate, played a game of tag in the
+snow with Adam, then, rosy and tired, established herself in Amos' arm
+chair with a book.  Lizzie was taking a long nap.  The dear old soul
+had been exhausted by the nursing.  Levine lay on the couch and finally
+asked Lydia to read aloud to him.  She was deep in "The Old Curiosity
+Shop" and was glad to share it with her friend.
+
+During the remainder of the afternoon John watched the snowflakes or
+Lydia's sensitive little red face and listened to the immortal story.
+
+Suddenly he was astonished to hear Lydia's voice tremble.  She was
+reading of little Nell's last sickness.  "She was dead.  Dear, patient,
+noble Nell was dead.  No sleep so beautiful and calm.  She seemed a
+creature fresh from the hand of God.  Not one who had lived and
+suffered death."
+
+Lydia suddenly broke off, bowed her yellow head on the book and broke
+into deep, long drawn sobs that were more like a woman's than a child's.
+
+John rose as quickly as he could.  "My dearest!" he exclaimed.  "What's
+the matter?"  He pulled her from the arm chair, seated himself, then
+drew her to his knees.
+
+"I can't bear it!" sobbed Lydia.  "I can't.  Seems sometimes if I
+couldn't have little Patience again I'd die!  That's the way she looked
+in her coffin, you remember?  'F-fresh from the hand of God--not one
+who h-had lived and s-suffered death.'  O my little, little sister!"
+
+John took "The Old Curiosity Shop" from the trembling fingers and flung
+it upon the couch.  Then he gathered Lydia in his arms and hushed her
+against his heart.
+
+"Sweetheart!  Sweetheart!  Why, I didn't realize you still felt so!
+Think how happy Patience must be up there with God and her mother!  You
+wouldn't wish her back!"
+
+"If I believed that I could stand it--but there isn't any God!"
+
+Levine gasped.  "Lydia!  Hush now!  Stop crying and tell me about it."
+
+He rocked slowly back and forth, patting her back and crooning to her
+until the sobs stopped.
+
+"There!" he said.  "And what makes you think there's no God, dear?"
+
+"If there was a God, He'd answer prayers.  Or He'd give some sign."
+Lydia lifted a tear-stained face from John's shoulder.  "He's never
+paid any attention to me," she said tensely.  "I've tried every way to
+make Him hear.  Sometimes in the dusk, I've taken Adam and we've gone
+deep into the woods and I've sat and thought about Him till--till there
+was nothing else in the world but my thought of Him.  And I never got a
+sign.  And I've floated on my back in the lake looking up into the sky
+trying to make myself believe He was there--and I couldn't.  All I knew
+was that Mother and Patience were dead and in coffins in the ground."
+
+Levine's sallow face was set with pain.  "Why, child, this isn't right.
+You're too young for such thoughts!  Lydia, do you read the Bible?"
+
+She nodded.  "I've tried that too--but Jesus might have believed
+everything He said was true, yet there mightn't have been a word of
+truth in it.  Do you believe in God?"
+
+John's hold on the thin hands tightened.  He stared long and
+thoughtfully at the snowflakes sifting endlessly past the window.
+
+"Lydia," he said, at last.  "I'll admit that my faith in the hereafter
+and in an All-seeing God has been considerably shaken as I've grown
+older.  But I'll admit too, that I've refused to give the matter much
+thought.  I tell you what I'll do.  Let's you and I start on our first
+travel trip, right now!  Let's start looking for God, together.  He's
+there all right, my child.  But you and I don't seem to be able to use
+the ordinary paths to get to Him.  So we'll hack out our own trail, eh?
+And you'll tell me what your progress is--and where you get lost--and
+I'll tell you.  It may take us years, but we'll get there, by heck!
+Eh, young Lydia?"
+
+Lydia looked into the deep black eyes long and earnestly.  And as she
+looked there stole into her heart a sense of companionship, of
+protection, of complete understanding, that spread like a warm glow
+over her tense nerves.  It was a sense that every child should grow up
+with, yet that Lydia had not known since her mother's death.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, "I feel happier already.  Of course we'll find Him.
+I'll begin my hunt to-morrow."
+
+John smoothed her tumbled hair gently.  "We're great friends, aren't
+we, Lydia!  I've an idea you'll always believe in me no matter what
+folks say, eh?"
+
+"You bet!" replied Lydia solemnly.
+
+John Levine went back to his duties as sheriff and Lydia and Amos and
+Lizzie missed him for a long time.  But gradually life fell back into
+the old routine and spring, then summer, were on them almost before
+they realized winter was gone.
+
+Lydia did well at school, though she still was an isolated little
+figure among her schoolmates.  The cooking teacher added sewing to the
+course, after Christmas, and Lydia took up "over and over stitch" at
+the point where her gentle mother had left off five years before.  She
+progressed so famously that by the time school closed she had learned
+how to use a shirtwaist pattern and how to fit a simple skirt.  With
+her plans for a summer of dress-making she looked with considerable
+equanimity on the pretty spring wardrobes of her schoolmates.
+
+They saw less than ever of Levine when summer came, for he was
+beginning his campaign for Congressman.  He came out occasionally on
+Sunday and then he and Lydia would manage a little stroll in the woods
+or along the lake shore when they would talk over their progress in the
+Spiritual Traveling they had undertaken in January.  Lydia had decided
+to give the churches a chance and was deliberately attending one Sunday
+School after another, studying each one with a child's simple sincerity.
+
+One source of relief to Lydia during the summer was that Mrs. Marshall
+and Margery spent two months in the East.  Lydia had faithfully kept in
+touch with Margery ever since her promise had been given to Dave
+Marshall.  But she did not like the banker's daughter--nor her mother.
+So again as far as playmates were concerned Lydia spent a solitary
+summer.
+
+Yet she was not lonely.  Never before had the lake seemed so beautiful
+to her.  Sitting on the little pier with Adam while her father worked
+in his garden, she watched the sunset across the water, night after
+night.  There was nothing that seemed to bring her nearer to a sense of
+God than this.  Night after night the miracle, always the same, always
+different.  The sun slipped down behind the distant hills, the clouds
+turned purple in the Western hill tops, fading toward the zenith to an
+orange that turned to azure as she watched.  The lake beneath painted
+the picture again, with an added shimmer, a more mysterious glow.
+Little fish flashed like flecks of gold from the water, dropping back
+in a shower of amethyst.  Belated dragon flies darted home.  And the
+young girl watching, listening, waiting, felt her spirit expand to a
+demand greater than she could answer.
+
+Amos was keenly interested in Levine's campaign.  His attitude toward
+politics was curiously detached, when one considered that he was
+saturated with information--both as to state and national politics.  He
+was vicious in his criticism of the Democrats, ardent in his support of
+the Republicans, yet it never seemed to occur to him that it was his
+political duty to do anything more than talk.  He seemed to feel that
+his ancestors in helping to launch the government had forever relieved
+him from any duty more onerous than that of casting a vote.
+
+He did, however, take Lydia one September evening just before school
+opened to hear John make a speech in the Square.  Lydia up to this time
+had given little heed to the campaign, but she was delighted with the
+unwonted adventure of being away from home in the evening.
+
+It was a soft, moonlit night.  The old Square, filled with giant elms,
+was dotted with arc lights that threw an undulating light on the gray
+mass of the Capitol building.  When Amos and Lydia arrived the Square
+was full of a laughing, chattering crowd.  Well dressed men and women
+from the University and the lake shore, workingmen, smoking black
+pipes, pushing baby carriages, while their wives in Sunday best hung on
+their arms.  Young boys and girls of Lydia's age chewed gum and
+giggled.  Older boys and girls kept to the shadows of the elms and
+whispered.  On the wooden platform extended from the granite steps of
+the Capitol, a band dispensed dance music and patriotic airs, breaking
+into "America" as Levine made his way to the front of the platform.
+
+Almost instantly the crowd became quiet.  A curious sort of tenseness
+became apparent as Levine began to speak.
+
+Lydia stared up at him.  He looked very elegant to her in his frock
+coat and gray trousers.  She was filled with pride at the thought of
+how close and dear he was to her.  She wished that the folk about her
+realized that she and her shabby father were intimate with the hero of
+the evening.
+
+The first part of the address interested Lydia very little.  It
+concerned the possibility of a new Post Office for Lake City and made
+numerous excursions into the matter of free trade.  It did not seem to
+Lydia that in spite of their attitude of tenseness, the people around
+her were much more interested than she.
+
+Then of a sudden Levine launched his bolt.
+
+"But after all," he said, "my friends, what is free trade or a new Post
+Office to you or me?  Actually nothing, as far as our selfish and
+personal interests go.  And who is not selfish, who is not personal in
+his attitude toward his community and his country?  I frankly admit
+that I am.  I suspect that you are.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, twenty miles north of this old and highly
+civilized city, lies a tract fifty miles square of primitive forest,
+inhabited by savages.  That tract of land is as beautiful as a dream of
+heaven.  Virgin pines tower to the heavens.  Little lakes lie hid like
+jewels on its bosoms.  Its soil is black.  Fur bearing animals frequent
+it now as they did a century ago.
+
+"Friends, in this city of white men there is want and suffering for the
+necessities of life.  Twenty miles to the north lies plenty for every
+needy inhabitant of the town, lies a bit of loam and heaven-kissing
+pines for each and all.
+
+"But, you say, they belong to the Indians!  Friends, they belong to a
+filthy, degenerate, lazy race of savages, who refuse to till the fields
+or cut the pines, who spend on whiskey the money allowed them by a
+benevolent government and live for the rest, like beasts of the field.
+
+"Why, I ask you, should Indians be pampered and protected, while whites
+live only in the bitter air of competition?
+
+"I am not mincing words to-night.  I do not talk of taking the lands
+from the Indians by crooked methods.  You all know the law.  An Indian
+may not sell the lands allotted to him.  I want you to send me to
+Congress to change that law.  I want the Indian to be able to sell his
+acreage."
+
+Levine stopped and bowed.  Pandemonium broke loose in the Square.
+Clapping, hisses, cheers and cat-calls.  Lydia clung to her father's
+arm while he began to struggle through the crowd.
+
+"Well," he said, as they reached the outer edge of the Square and
+headed for the trolley, "the battle is on."
+
+"But what will the Indians do, Daddy, if they sell their land?" asked
+Lydia.
+
+"Do!  Why just what John intimated.  Get out and hustle for a living
+like the rest of us do.  Why not?"
+
+Why not indeed!  "What did some of the people hiss for?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Oh, there's a cheap bunch of sentimentalists in the town,--all of 'em,
+you'll notice, with good incomes,--who claim the Indians are like
+children, so we should take care of 'em like children.  Then there's
+another bunch who make a fat living looting the Indians.  They don't
+want the reservation broken up.  I'm going to sit on the back seat of
+the car and smoke."
+
+Lydia clambered into the seat beside her father.  "Well--but--well, I
+suppose if Mr. Levine feels that way and you too, it's right.  But they
+are kind of like children.  Charlie Jackson's awful smart, but he's
+like a child too."
+
+"I don't care what they're like," said Amos.  "We've babied 'em long
+enough.  Let 'em get out and hustle."
+
+"Do you think Mr. Levine'll get elected?"
+
+Amos shrugged his shoulders.  "Never can tell.  This is a Democratic
+town, but Levine is standing for something both Democrats and
+Republicans want.  It'll be a pretty fight.  May split the Democratic
+party."
+
+This was the beginning of Lydia's reading of the newspapers.  To her
+father's secret amusement, she found the main details of Levine's
+battle as interesting as a novel.  Every evening when he got home to
+supper he found her poring over the two local papers and primed with
+questions for him.  Up to this moment she had lived in a quiet world
+bounded by her school, the home, the bit of lake shore and wood with
+which she was intimate, and peopled by her father and her few friends.
+
+With John Levine's speech, her horizon suddenly expanded to take in the
+city and the vague picture of the reservation to the north.  She
+realized that the eyes of the whole community were focused on her
+dearest friend.  Up on the quiet, shaded college campus--the newspapers
+told her--they spoke of him contemptuously.  He was a cheap politician,
+full of unsound economic principles, with a history of dishonest land
+deals behind him.  It would be a shame to the community to be
+represented by such a man.  They said that his Democratic opponent, a
+lawyer who had been in Congress some five terms, was at least a
+gentleman whose career had been a clean and open book.
+
+When these slurs reached Levine, he answered in a vitriolic speech in
+which he named the names of several members of the faculty who had
+profited through the Indian agent in quiet little sales of worthless
+goods to Indians.
+
+The saloon element, Lydia learned, was against Levine.  It wanted the
+reservation to stand.  That the saloon element should be in harmony
+with them was galling to the college crowd, though the fact that their
+motives for agreement were utterly different was some solace.
+
+The "fast crowd" were for John.  Clubmen, politicians, real estate men
+were high in his praise.  The farmers all were going to vote for him.
+
+Lake City was always interested in the national election but this year,
+where the presidential candidates were mentioned once, Levine and his
+opponent were mentioned a hundred times.  Ministers preached sermons on
+the campaign.  The Ladies' Aid Society of the Methodist Church, the
+Needlework Guild of the Episcopalian, the Woman's Auxiliary of the
+Unitarian, hereditary enemies, combined forces to work for Levine, and
+the freeing of the poor Indian from bondage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE NOTE
+
+
+"Each year I strew the ground with cones, yet no young pines grow up.
+This has been true only since the Indians went."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Margery Marshall had entered High School this fall.  She had returned
+from New York with a trousseau that a bride might have envied.  She was
+growing tall, and her beauty already was remarkable.  Her little head
+carried its great black braid proudly.  The pallor of her skin was
+perfectly healthy--and even the Senior lads were seen to observe her
+with interest and appreciation.
+
+The results of Lydia's summer dressmaking had not been bad.  She had
+made herself several creditable shirtwaists and a neat little blue
+serge skirt.  Her shoes were still shabby.  Poor Lydia seemed somehow
+never to have decent shoes.  But her hands and the back of her neck
+were clean; and her pile of Junior school books already had been paid
+for--by picking small fruit for Ma Norton during the summer and helping
+her to can it.  She came back to school with zeal and less than her
+usual sense of shabbiness.
+
+It was a day toward the first of October at the noon hour that Lydia
+met Kent and Charlie Jackson.  She had finished her lunch, which she
+ate in the cloakroom, and bareheaded and coatless was walking up and
+down the sidewalk before the schoolhouse.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!  How's everything?" asked Kent.  "I haven't seen you to
+talk to since last spring."
+
+"Did you have a fine summer?" said Lydia.
+
+"Aw, only part of it.  Dad made me work till the middle of August, then
+Charlie and I camped up on the reservation."
+
+"Shame he had to work, isn't it?" grinned Charlie.  "Poor little Kent!"
+
+The three laughed, for Kent now towered above Lydia a half head and was
+as brawny as Charlie.
+
+"There comes Margery," said Lydia.  "She hardly speaks to me now, she's
+been to New York."
+
+"She _is_ a peach," exclaimed Charlie, eying Margery in her natty
+little blue suit appraisingly.
+
+"Some swell dame, huh?" commented Kent, his hands in his trousers'
+pockets, cap on the back of his head.  "Hello, Marg!  Whither and why?"
+
+"Oh, how de do, Kent!"  Margery approached languidly, including Lydia
+and Charlie in her nod.
+
+"Got any paper dolls in your pocket, Miss Marshall?" inquired Charlie.
+
+Margery tossed her head.  "Oh, I gave up that sort of thing long ago!"
+
+"Land sakes!"  The young Indian chuckled.
+
+"How do you like High School, Margery?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Oh, it's well enough for a year or so!  Of course Mama, I
+mean--Mother's going to send me to New York to finish."
+
+"'Mother!' suffering cats!" moaned Kent.  "Marg, you're getting so
+refined, I almost regret having pulled you out of the lake that time."
+
+"_You_!  Why Kent Marshall, I pulled her out myself!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"And I saved both of you--and got licked for it," said Kent.
+
+"I hope you all had a pleasant summer," observed Margery, twisting up
+the curls in front of her small ears.  "Mother and I were in New York."
+
+Kent, Lydia and Charlie exchanged glances.
+
+"I had a pretty good summer," said Lydia.  "I sewed and cooked and
+scrubbed and swam and once Adam, Dad, Mr. Levine and I walked clear
+round the lake, eighteen miles.  Adam nearly died, he's so fat and
+bow-legged.  He scolded all the way."
+
+"I don't see how your father can let that Mr. Levine come to your
+house!" exclaimed Margery with sudden energy.  "My father says he's a
+dangerous man."
+
+"He's a crook!" said Charlie, stolidly and finally.
+
+Lydia stamped her foot.  "He's not and he's my friend!" she cried.
+
+"You'd better not admit it!"  Margery's voice was scornful.  "Daddy
+says he's going to speak to your father about him."
+
+"Your father'd better not go up against Levine too hard," said Kent,
+with a superior masculine air.  "Just tell him I said so."
+
+"You don't stick up for Levine, do you, Kent?" asked Charlie,
+indignantly.
+
+"Why, no, but Dave Marshall's got no business to put his nose in the
+air over John Levine.  I don't care if he is Margery's father.
+Everybody in town knows that he's as cruel as a wolf about mortgages
+and some of his money deals won't bear daylight."
+
+"Don't you dare to say such things about my father," shrieked Margery.
+
+"He was awful good to Dad and me about a money matter," protested Lydia.
+
+"Aw, all of us men are good to you, Lyd," said Kent impatiently.
+"You're that kind.  Being good to you don't make a man a saint.  Look
+at Levine.  He's got a lot of followers, but I'll bet you're the only
+person he's fond of."
+
+"He's a crook," repeated Charlie, slowly.  "If what he's trying to do
+goes through, my tribe'll be wanderers on the face of the earth.  If I
+thought it would do any good, I'd kill him.  But some other brute of a
+white would take his place.  It's hopeless."
+
+The three young whites looked at the Indian wonderingly.  Their little
+spatting was as nothing, they realized, to the mature and tragic
+bitterness that Charlie expressed.  A vague sense of a catastrophe,
+epic in character, that the Indian evidently saw clearly, but was
+beyond their comprehension, silenced them.  The awkward pause was
+broken by the school bell.
+
+Lydia had plenty to think of on her long walk home.  Charlie's voice
+and words haunted her.  What did it all mean?  Why was he so resentful
+and so hopeless?  She made up her mind that when she had the
+opportunity to ask him, she would.  She sighed a little, as she thought
+of the comments of her mates on John Levine.  Little by little she was
+realizing that she was the only person in the world that saw the
+gentle, tender side of the Republican candidate for Congress.  The
+realization thrilled her, while it worried her.  She had an idea that
+she ought to make him show the world the heart he showed to her.  As
+she turned in at the gate and received Adam's greetings, she resolved
+to talk this matter over with Levine.
+
+The opportunity to talk with Charlie came about simply enough.  At
+recess one day a week or so later he asked her if she was going to the
+first Senior Hop of the year.  Lydia gave him a clear look.
+
+"Why do you ask me that?  Just to embarrass me?" she said.
+
+Charlie looked startled.  "Lord knows I didn't mean anything," he
+exclaimed.  "What're you so touchy about?"
+
+Lydia's cheeks burned redder than usual.  "I went to a party at Miss
+Towne's when I was a Freshman and I promised myself I'd never go to
+another."
+
+"Why not!"  Charlie's astonishment was genuine.
+
+"Clothes," replied Lydia, briefly.
+
+The Indian boy leaned against a desk and looked Lydia over through
+half-closed eyes.  "You're an awful pretty girl, Lydia.  Honest you
+are, and you've got more brain in a minute than any other girl in
+school'll have all her life."
+
+Lydia blushed furiously.  Then moved by Charlie's simplicity and
+obviously sincere liking, she came closer to him and said, "Then,
+Charlie, why hasn't any boy ever asked me to a party?  Is it just
+clothes?"
+
+Looking up at him with girlish wistfulness in the blue depths of her
+eyes, with the something tragic in the lines of her face that little
+Patience's death had written there irradicably, with poverty speaking
+from every fold of the blouse and skirt, yet with all the indescribable
+charm of girlish beauty at fifteen, Lydia was more appealing than
+Charlie could stand.
+
+"Lydia, I'll take you to a party a week, if you'll go!" he cried.
+
+"No!  No!  I couldn't go," she protested.  "Answer my question--is it
+clothes?"
+
+"No, only half clothes," answered Charlie, meeting her honestly.  "The
+other half is you know too much.  You know the fellows like a girl that
+giggles a lot and don't know as much as he does and that's a peachy
+dancer and that'll let him hold her hand and kiss her.  And that's the
+honest to God truth, Lydia."
+
+"Oh," she said.  "Oh--"  Then, "Well, I could giggle, all right.  I
+can't dance very well because I've just picked up the steps from
+watching the girls teach each other in the cloakroom.  Oh, well, I
+don't care!  I've got Adam and I've got Mr. Levine."
+
+"He's a nice one to have," sneered Charlie.
+
+"Why do you hate him so, Charlie?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Lots of reasons.  And I'll hate him more if he gets his bill through
+Congress."
+
+"I don't see why you feel so," said Lydia.  "You get along all right
+without the reservation, why shouldn't the other Indians.  I don't
+understand."
+
+"No, you don't understand," replied Charlie, "you're like most of the
+other whites round here.  You see a chance to get land and you'd
+crucify each other if you needed to, to get it.  What chance do Indians
+stand?  But I tell you this," his voice sank to a hoarse whisper and
+his eyes looked far beyond her, "if there is a God of the Indians as
+well as the whites, you'll pay some day!  You'll pay as we are paying."
+
+Lydia shivered.  "Don't talk so, Charlie.  I wish I knew all about it,
+the truth about it.  If I was a man, you bet before I voted, I'd find
+out.  I'd go up there on that reservation and I'd see for myself
+whether it would be better for the Indians to get off.  That poor old
+squaw I gave my lunch to, I wonder what would become of her--"
+
+"Look here, Lydia," exclaimed Charlie, "why don't you come up on the
+reservation for a camping trip, next summer, for a week or so?"
+
+"Costs too much," said Lydia.
+
+"Wouldn't either.  I can get tents and it wouldn't cost you anything
+but your share of the food.  Kent'll go and maybe one of the teachers
+would chaperone."
+
+Lydia's eyes kindled.  "Gee, Charlie, perhaps it could be fixed!  I got
+nine months to earn the money in.  It's something to look forward to."
+
+Charlie nodded and moved away.  "You'll learn things up there you never
+dreamed of," he said.
+
+The conversation with John Levine did not take place until the Sunday
+before the election.  The fight in the Congressional district had
+increased in bitterness as it went on.  Nothing but greed could have
+precipitated so malevolent a war.  The town was utterly disrupted.
+Neighbors of years' standing quarreled on sight.  Students in the
+University refused to enter the classrooms of teachers who disagreed
+with them on the Levine fight.  Family feuds developed.  Ancient family
+skeletons regarding pine grafts and Indian looting saw the light of day.
+
+On the Saturday a week before election, Lydia went to pay her duty call
+on Margery.  Elviry admitted her.  It was the first time Lydia had seen
+her since the New York trip.
+
+"Margery'll be right down," said Elviry.  "She's just finished her nap."
+
+"Her what?" inquired Lydia, politely.
+
+"Her nap.  A New York beauty doctor told me to have her take one every
+day.  Of course, going to school, she can't do it only Saturdays and
+Sundays.  She went to the Hop last night.  She looked lovely in a cream
+chiffon.  One of the college professors asked who was that little
+beauty.  Come in, Margery."
+
+Margery strolled into the room in a bright red kimona.  "How de do,
+Lydia," she said.
+
+"Hello, Margery.  Want to play paper dolls?"
+
+"Paper dolls!" shrieked Elviry.  "Why, Margery, you are fifteen!"
+
+"I don't care," replied Lydia obstinately.  "I still play 'em once in a
+while."
+
+"I haven't touched one since last spring," said Margery.  "Want to see
+my New York clothes?"
+
+"No, thank you," answered Lydia.  "I'd just as soon not.  I've got to
+get home right away."
+
+"What's in that big bundle?" asked Elviry, pointing to the huge paper
+parcel in Lydia's lap.
+
+"Nothing," she said shortly, looking at the rope portičres in the
+doorway.
+
+"I got new ones in the East," said Elviry, following her glance.
+"Shells strung together.  But I put 'em up only when we have parties.
+We don't use anything but doilies on the dining table now, no
+tablecloths.  It's the latest thing in New York.  Who made your
+shirtwaist, Lydia?"
+
+"I did," answered Lydia, not without pride.
+
+"I thought so," commented Elviry.  "How much was the goods a yard--six
+cents?  I thought so.  Hum--Margery's every day shirtwaists were none
+of them less than thirty-nine cents a yard, in New York.  But of course
+that's beyond you.  I don't suppose your father's had a raise, yet.  He
+ain't that kind.  Does he pay Levine any rent for that cottage?"
+
+"Of course, every month!" exclaimed Lydia, indignantly.
+
+"Oh!  I just asked!  Your father's been talking strong for him at the
+plow factory, they say, and we just wondered.  He's old enough to be
+your father, but you're getting to be a young lady now, Lydia, and it's
+very bad for your reputation to be seen with him.  You haven't any
+mother and I must speak."
+
+"I don't see how John Levine's reputation about Indians or pine lands
+can hurt me any," protested Lydia, angrily, "and I just think you're
+the impolitest person I know."
+
+Elviry snorted and started to speak but Margery interrupted.
+
+"You are impolite, Mama!  It's none of our business about Lydia--if she
+wants to be common."
+
+Lydia rose, holding the paper parcel carefully in her arms.  "I _am_
+common, just common folks!  I always was and I always will be and I'm
+glad of it--and I'm going home."
+
+The front door slammed as she spoke and Dave Marshall came in.
+
+"Hello!  Well, Lydia, this is a sight for sore eyes.  Thought you'd
+forgotten us.  What's in your bundle?"
+
+Lydia spoke furiously, tearing the paper off the bundle as she did so.
+
+"Well, since you're all so curious, I'll show you!"  And Florence
+Dombey, with the hectic gaze unchanged, emerged.  "There!" said Lydia.
+"I never shall be too old for Florence Dombey and I thought Margery
+wouldn't be either--but I was wrong.  I wrapped Florence Dombey up
+because I do look too big for dolls and I don't want folks to laugh at
+her."
+
+"Of course you're not too big for dolls," said Dave.  "You and Margery
+go on and have your play."
+
+"Daddy!" cried Margery.  "Why, I wouldn't touch a doll now."
+
+"There, you see!" said Lydia, laying Florence Dombey on a chair while
+she pulled on her coat--made this year from one that Lizzie had grown
+too stout to wear--"It's no use for me to try to be friends any more
+with Margery.  She's rich and I'm common and poor.  She has parties and
+beaux and clothes and I don't.  I'll be friends with you but I can't be
+friends with her."
+
+Dave looked from his two women folks to Lydia.  "What've you two been
+saying now?" he asked gruffly.
+
+Elviry tossed her head.  "Nothing at all.  I just showed a decent
+interest in Lydia, as I would in any motherless girl and she got mad."
+
+"Yes, I know your decent interest," grunted Dave.  "You make me sick,
+Elviry.  Why I was ever such a fool as to let you spend a summer in New
+York, I don't know."
+
+"Now, Dave," said Elviry in a conciliating tone, "you said that Lydia
+and Amos ought to be warned about Levine."
+
+"Yes, I did," exclaimed Dave, with a sudden change of voice.  "You tell
+your father to come round and see me this evening, Lydia.  I don't like
+his attitude on the reservation question.  Tell him if I can't change
+his views any other way, I may have to bring pressure with that note."
+
+Lydia blanched.  She looked at Marshall with parted lips.  She never
+had heard before the peculiar, metallic quality in his voice that she
+heard now.  She buttoned her coat with trembling fingers.
+
+"Yes, sir, I'll tell him," she said.  "I guess it's no use to try to be
+friends with you either.  We'll pay that note up, somehow.  Even it
+can't be allowed to keep us from believing what we believe."  Her voice
+strengthened suddenly.  "What's the use of being an American if you
+can't believe what you want to?  We'll pay that note!  If I have to
+quit school and go out as a hired girl, we will."
+
+Dave Marshall looked from Lydia to Margery and back again.  Margery was
+patting her curls.  Lydia, holding the doll, returned his look
+indignantly.
+
+"I'm not going to tell my father to come to see you.  I'll answer right
+now.  We'll think and say what we please and you can do whatever you
+want to about that nasty old note."
+
+Dave suddenly laughed.  "There, Elviry, that's what I mean about
+Lydia's being the real thing.  You can't help my being your friend,
+Lydia, no matter what happens.  But," grimly, "I'll call in that note
+unless your father shuts up."
+
+"Good-by!" exclaimed Lydia abruptly and she marched into the hall, head
+held high, and closed the outside door firmly behind her.
+
+It had been a long time since she had known the heavy sinking of the
+heart that she felt now.  In spite of their desperate poverty, since
+her interview in the bank with Marshall four years before, she had not
+worried about money matters.  She had an utter horror of repeating
+Marshall's message to her father.  Money worry made Amos frantic.  She
+plodded along the October road, unheeding the frosty sunshine or the
+scudding brown leaves that had charmed her on her earlier trip.
+
+In the midst of one of her longest sighs, Billy Norton overtook her.
+
+"Well, Lydia," he said, "isn't it chilly for your lady friend?"
+
+"Hello, Billy," said Lydia, looking up at the young man soberly.  Billy
+was a sophomore in college.
+
+"I'll carry her, if your hands are cold, though I'd hate to be caught
+at it," he said.
+
+Lydia ignored his offer.  "Billy, is there any way a girl like me could
+earn $600?" she asked him.
+
+"Golly, not that I know of!  Why?"
+
+"Oh, I just asked.  I wish I was a man."
+
+Billy looked at the scarlet cheeks and the blowing yellow curls.  "I
+don't," he said.  "What's worrying you, Lyd?"
+
+"Nothing," she insisted.  Then, anxious to change the subject, she
+asked, "What're you studying to be, Billy?"
+
+"A farmer.  Next year I shift into the long agric. course."
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia, "I don't see what you want to study to be
+a farmer for.  I should think you'd want to be something classy like a
+lawyer or--or something."
+
+"Lots of folks think the same way, but I believe a farmer's the most
+independent man in the world.  And that's what I want to be,
+independent--call no man boss."
+
+"That's me too, Billy," cried Lydia, pausing at her gate.  "That's what
+I want to be, independent.  That's what real Americans are."
+
+"You're a funny little girl," said Billy.  "What made you think of
+that?"
+
+"I often think about it," returned Lydia, running up the path to the
+door.
+
+Billy stood for a minute looking after her thoughtfully.  Then he
+smiled to himself and went on homeward.
+
+Lydia did not tell her father that night of Marshall's threat.  He was
+in such a tranquil mood that she could not bear to upset him.  But the
+next day she gathered her courage together and told him.  Amos was
+speechless for a moment.  Then to her surprise instead of walking the
+floor and swearing, he gave a long whistle.
+
+"So it's that serious, is it?  I wonder just what he's up to!  The old
+crook!  Huh!  This will be nuts for John though.  If he doesn't come
+out this afternoon, I'll go look him up this evening."
+
+Lydia's jaw dropped.  "But, Daddy, you don't seem to realize we'll have
+to pay $600 the first of January," she urged, her voice still
+trembling.  She had scarcely slept the night before in dread of this
+moment.
+
+For the first time, Amos looked at her carefully.  "Why, my dear child,
+there's nothing to worry about!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You mean you're going to stop talking for Mr. Levine?  Oh, Daddy,
+don't do that!  We can borrow the money somewhere and I'll help pay it
+back.  I'm almost grown up now."
+
+"'Stop talking'!" roared Amos.  "I've fallen pretty far below what my
+ancestors stood for, but I ain't that low yet.  Now," his voice
+softened, "you stop worrying.  Levine and I'll take care of this."
+
+Lydia looked at her father doubtfully and suddenly he laughed
+unsteadily and kissed her.  "You get more and more like your mother.
+I've seen that look on her face a hundred times when I told her I'd fix
+up a money matter.  I don't know what I'd do without you, Lydia, I
+swan."
+
+This was rare demonstrativeness for Amos.  The reaction from anxiety
+was almost too much for Lydia.  She laughed a little wildly, and
+seizing Adam by his fore paws put him through a two step that was agony
+for the heavy fellow.  Then she put on her coat, and bareheaded started
+for a walk.  Amos stood in the window staring after the bright hair in
+the October sun until it disappeared into the woods.  Then he sighed
+softly.  "Oh, Patience, Patience, I wonder if you can see her now!"
+
+Levine stole away from his various councils and reached the cottage
+about supper time.
+
+"If I didn't get out here once in a while," he said as he sat down to
+the waffles and coffee that made the Sunday night treat Lydia had
+lately developed, "I'd get to believe every one was playing politics."
+
+Lizzie, pouring the coffee, looked Levine over.  "A bullet'd have hard
+work to hit you now," she remarked, "you're so thin.  If you'd listen
+to me, you'd be taking Cod Liver Oil."
+
+Levine smiled at the wrinkled old face opposite.  "If I didn't listen
+to you, I don't know who I would.  Aren't you and Lydia all the women
+folks I got?  If you'll fix me up some dope, I'll take a dose every
+time I come out here."
+
+Lizzie sniffed and loaded his plate with another waffle.  Amos was
+giving no heed to these small amenities.  He was eating his waffles
+absentmindedly and suddenly burst forth,
+
+"Lydia, tell John about Dave Marshall."
+
+Lydia, flushing uncomfortably, did so.  Levine did not cease his
+onslaught on the waffles during the recital.  When she had finished, he
+passed his coffee cup.
+
+"Another cup, young Lydia.  Your coffee is something to dream of."
+
+Lydia was too surprised to take the cup.  "But--but _six hundred
+dollars_.  Mr. Levine!" she gasped.
+
+"Good news, eh, Amos?" said Levine.  "Getting anxious, isn't he!"  Then
+catching Lydia's look of consternation, "Why, bless your soul, Lydia,
+what are you upset about?  Let him call in the loan.  I can pay it."
+
+Amos nodded.  "Just what I said."
+
+"But I think that's awful," protested Lydia.  "We owe Mr. Levine so
+much now."
+
+The effect of her words on John was astonishing.  He half rose from his
+chair and said in a tone not to be forgotten, "Lydia, never let me hear
+you speak again of owing me anything!  Between you and me there can
+never be any sense of obligation.  Do you understand me?"
+
+There was a moment's silence at the table, Amos and Lizzie glanced at
+each other, but Lydia's clear gaze was on the deep eyes of Levine.
+What she saw there she was too young to understand, but she answered
+gravely,
+
+"All right, Mr. Levine."
+
+John sank back in his chair and passed his plate for a waffle.
+
+"I'll make my interest and payments to you then, thank the Lord!" said
+Amos.
+
+"We'll make them on time just as usual," remarked Lydia, in a voice
+that had both reproof and warning in it.  "Ain't debts perfectly
+awful," she sighed.
+
+"So Marshall's worried," repeated John, complacently, when they were
+gathered round the stove.  "Well, it behooves him to be.  I don't know
+what he'll do when the Indians are gone."
+
+"Mr. Levine," asked Lydia, "where'll the Indians go?"
+
+John shrugged his shoulders.  "Go to the devil, most of them."
+
+"Oh, but that seems terrible!" cried Lydia.
+
+"No more terrible than the way they live and die on the reservation.
+My dear child, don't develop any sentiment for the Indian.  He's as
+doomed as the buffalo.  It's fate or life or evolution working
+out--whatever your fancy names it.  No sickly gush will stop it.  As
+long as the Indian has a pine or a pelt, we'll exploit him.  When he
+has none, we'll kick him out, like the dead dog he is."
+
+Lydia, her eyes round, her lips parted, did not reply.  For a moment
+she saw the Levine that the world saw, cold, logical, merciless.  John
+interpreted her expression instantly and smiled.  "Don't look at me so,
+young Lydia.  I'm just being honest.  The rest talk about 'freeing the
+Indian.'  I say damn the Indian, enrich the whites."
+
+"It--it makes me feel sort of sick at my stomach," replied Lydia,
+slowly.  "I suppose you're right, but I can't help feeling sorry for
+Charlie Jackson and my old squaw."
+
+Levine nodded understandingly and turned to Amos.  "What's the talk in
+the factory?" he asked.
+
+During the half hour that followed, Lydia did not speak again nor did
+she hear any of the conversation.  New voices were beginning to whisper
+to her.  Try as she would to hush them with her faith in her father and
+John, they continued to query: How about the Indians?  Whose is the
+land?  What do you yourself believe?
+
+When Levine rose at nine to leave, she followed him to the door.  "Adam
+and I'll walk a way with you," she said, "while Dad puts his chickens
+to bed."
+
+"Fine!" exclaimed John.  "My wheel is out of commission so I have to
+walk to the trolley."
+
+He glanced at Lydia a trifle curiously however.  This was a new venture
+on her part.  It was a clear, cold, starlit night.  Lydia trudged along
+for a few moments in silence.  Then Levine pulled her hand through his
+arm.
+
+"Out with it, young Lydia," he said.
+
+"Do you suppose," she asked, "that God is something like ether--or like
+electricity--in the air, everywhere, something that sort of holds us
+together, you know?"
+
+"Well," replied John, slowly, "I wouldn't want to believe that.  I want
+to find a God we can know and understand.  A God that's tender and--and
+human, by Jove."
+
+Lydia looked up at him quickly in the starlight.  "After what you said
+about Indians to-night, you can't believe God could be tender and--and
+let that happen!"
+
+Levine returned her look and smiled.  "You score there, honey.  Lydia,
+you're growing up.  Your head's above my shoulder now."
+
+The young girl nodded carelessly.  "But I wanted to talk to you about
+taking the reservation, not about me."
+
+"I guess we'd better do that another time.  I don't dare to have you
+walk further with me.  This is a lonesome road back for you.  And
+besides, I don't want you to scold me."
+
+"Scold you!" Lydia paused in her astonishment.  "Why, I love you as
+much as I do anybody in the world.  How could I scold you?"
+
+Levine looked down into the shadowy, childish eyes.  "Couldn't you?
+Well, you're a dear, anyhow.  Now scoot and I'll watch till you reach
+the gate."
+
+Lydia hesitated.  She felt a change in John's manner and wondered if
+she had hurt his feelings.  "Kiss me good night, then," she said.  "You
+don't do it as regularly as you used to.  If I don't watch you, you'll
+be finding some one else to travel with you."
+
+John turned the little face up and kissed her gently on the forehead,
+but Lydia with rare demonstrativeness threw her arms about his neck and
+kissed his lips with a full childish smack.
+
+"There!" she said complacently.  "Come on, Adam!  Don't wait, Mr.
+Levine.  I'm safe with Adam."
+
+But John Levine did wait, standing with his hand against his lips, his
+head bowed, till he heard the gate click.  Then he lifted his face to
+the stars.  "God," he whispered, "why do You make me forty-five instead
+of twenty-five?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE ELECTION
+
+
+"Perhaps, after all, I have fulfilled my destiny in being a lute for
+the wind.  But then why the cones and the broken boughs?"--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+It rained on Election Day, a cold November drizzle that elated the
+Democrats.  "A rainy day always brings a Democratic victory," said
+Amos, gloomily, voicing the general superstition.
+
+The day was a legal holiday and even the saloons were closed.  Yet Lake
+City was full of drunken men by noon.  Every hack, surrey and hotel bus
+in town was busy in the pay of one faction or the other hauling voters
+to the booths.  The Capitol square was deserted but groups of men, some
+of them very drunk and some of them very sober, were to be found
+throughout the business section of the city, bitterly debating the
+reservation question.
+
+There were a great number of Indians in town that day, big dark fellows
+in muddy moccasins and faded mackinaws who stood about watching the
+machinations of the whites without audible comments.
+
+Toward night the rain stopped and Lydia begged her father to take her
+into town to see the parade that would be indulged in by the victorious
+party.  Amos was not at all averse to taking in the parade, himself.
+So nine o'clock found the two at the Square with a great waiting crowd.
+There were very few women in the crowd.  Those that Lydia saw were
+painted and loud-voiced.  Amos told her vaguely that they were
+"hussies" and that she was not to let go of his arm for an instant.
+
+Lydia didn't know what a hussy was, but she didn't want to stir an inch
+from her father's side because of her fear of drunken men.  She was in
+a quiver of excitement; torn with pity and doubt when she thought of
+Charlie Jackson; speechless with apprehension when she thought of the
+possibility of Levine's being defeated.
+
+It was close on ten o'clock when the sound of a drum was heard from the
+direction of the Methodist Church.  The crowd started toward the sound,
+then paused as Binny Bates, the barber, in a stove-pipe hat, mounted on
+a much excited horse, rode up the street.  Binny was a Levine man and
+the crowd broke into cheers and cat-calls.
+
+After Binny came the band, playing for dear life "Hail the Conquering
+Hero" and after the band, two and two a great line of citizens with
+kerosene torches.  After the torches came the transparencies: "Levine
+Wins!"  "The Reservation is Ours."  "Back to the land, boys!"  "We've
+dropped the white men's burden."
+
+And following the transparencies came a surprise for crowd and paraders
+alike.  Close on the heels of the last white man strode Charlie
+Jackson, with a sign, "The land is ours!  You have robbed us!" and
+after Charlie, perhaps a hundred Indians, tramping silently two by two,
+to the faint strain of the band ahead,
+
+  "Columbia, the gem of the ocean
+  The home of the brave and the free--"
+
+For a moment, the crowd was surprised into silence.  Then a handful of
+mud caught Charlie's sign and a group of college students, with a shout
+of "Break up the line!  Break up the line," broke into the ranks of the
+Indians and in a moment a free for all fight was on.
+
+Amos rushed Lydia down a side street and upon a street car.  "Well!
+Well!  Well!" he kept chuckling.  "John ate 'em alive!  Well!  Well!"
+Then in the light of the car he looked at Lydia.  "For heaven's sake!
+What are you crying for, child?"
+
+"I don't know," faltered Lydia.  "I'm--glad for Mr. Levine--but poor
+Charlie Jackson!  You don't suppose they'll hurt him?"
+
+"Oh, pshaw," replied Amos.  "Nothing but an election night fight!  The
+young Indian went into the parade just to start one."
+
+"How soon will the Indians have to get off the reservation?" asked
+Lydia.
+
+"Oh, in a year or so!  John's got to get a bill through Congress, you
+know."
+
+"Oh."  Lydia gave a great sigh of relief; a year or so was a very long
+time.  She decided to forget the Indians' trouble and rejoice in
+Levine's triumph.
+
+It was a triumph that John himself took very quietly.  He realized that
+he had ahead of him in Congress a long and heavy campaign.  The forces
+against him were not going to lie down, defeated by his election.  But
+after the fashion of American elections, there were no protests or
+quarrels afterward.  The town settled immediately to its old routine
+and Levine was dropped from the front pages of the newspapers.
+
+Charlie Jackson was taciturn for a week or so, then he played
+brilliantly in the Thanksgiving football game and at the banquet which
+followed he was his old genial self.
+
+After Christmas Lydia began seriously to consider how she could earn
+the twenty-five dollars that her share in the camping trip would cost.
+Lizzie was aghast at the size of the sum and didn't approve of the idea
+of camping anyhow.  Amos gave his consent to her going, feeling that it
+was quite safe; that Lydia never could earn the money.
+
+Lydia was dampened but not daunted.  One (in January) Saturday
+afternoon, she went to call on Ma Norton.  Ma was sitting in her bright
+kitchen sewing carpet rags.  Ma's hair was beginning to turn gray but
+her plump cheeks were red and her gray eyes behind her spectacles were
+as clear as a girl's.
+
+"Who's going to chaperone you children?" she asked Lydia.
+
+"Miss Towne.  The rest kicked, but I like her."
+
+"You use a good deal of unnecessary slang, my dear," said Ma.  "Who of
+the boys and girls are going?"
+
+"Charlie and Kent and Olga and I.  Margery's crazy to go, only her
+mother hasn't given in yet.  If she does go, we'll ask Gustus Bach too."
+
+Ma Norton looked at Lydia searchingly.  "I didn't know you had anything
+to do with Olga or with Margery either, now."
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia, "this is Charlie's, party!  None of 'em
+would go on my invitation.  I--I don't quite see why, but I don't have
+chums like the rest."
+
+"I wouldn't let it worry me," said Ma.  "You've never had time to
+lally-gag.  That's the secret of it."
+
+Lydia turned this over in her mind thoughtfully for a moment and the
+older woman, looking up from her sewing caught on the young face the
+look of sadness that should not have been there.
+
+"It would be nice for you to have the camping trip, dear," said Ma.
+"You've had so little to do with children your own age.  I suppose
+you're worrying over the money end?"
+
+Lydia nodded.  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about.  Every
+spring you get some one in to help you clean house.  If you'll do it in
+Easter vacation, this year, and let me help, why, that would be a
+couple of dollars, wouldn't it?"
+
+Ma Norton looked at the slender little figure and thought of the heavy
+carpet beating, the shoving of furniture, the cleaning of mattresses
+that the stout old colored man hustled through for her every spring.
+And she thought of the winter's butter and egg money (nearly forty
+dollars it amounted to already) that she was saving for new parlor
+curtains.  Then she recalled the little figure that had nightly trudged
+two miles delivering milk rather than take Billy's school books as a
+gift.  And Ma Norton smiled a little ruefully as she said,
+
+"All right, you can help me instead of old Job and I'll pay you five
+dollars."
+
+"Five dollars for what?" asked Billy.  He had come in the side door,
+unheeded.
+
+His mother explained the situation.  Billy listened attentively,
+warming his hands at the stove.
+
+"If I didn't have so much to do at home," said Lydia, "I could work
+here Saturdays and Sundays and earn a little, that way."
+
+"Well, you wouldn't, you know," growled Billy.  Lydia and Ma Norton
+looked up, startled at his tone.
+
+"For the land's sake, Billy, why not?" exclaimed Ma.
+
+"Because, Lydia's getting too big now to do these hired girl stunts.
+It was bad enough when she was little.  But folks'll never forget 'em
+and always think of her as a hired girl if she keeps on."
+
+Lydia gasped and turned scarlet.  Ma Norton stared at her son as if she
+never had seen him before.  Strong and blonde and six feet tall, he
+seemed suddenly to his mother no longer a boy but a mature man, and a
+very handsome one at that.  As a matter of fact, although Billy's gaunt
+frame was filling out and his irregular features were maturing into
+lines of rugged strength, he never would be handsome.  He was looking
+at Lydia now with the curious expression of understanding that she
+always brought to his gray eyes.
+
+"I'm not ashamed to be a hired girl for your mother, Billy Norton,"
+snapped Lydia.
+
+"Well, I'm ashamed for you," answered the young man.  "You earn your
+money some other way."
+
+Lydia looked meaningly at Billy's big hands, rough and red with milking
+and farm work.
+
+"You do hired man's work for your father.  How'll you live that down?"
+
+It was Billy's turn to blush.  "I'm a man," he replied.
+
+Lydia's voice suddenly quivered.  "Then how can I earn money?"
+
+"Dead easy!  You make the best fudge in the world.  Put some for sale
+in the University book store.  I'm clerking there an hour every day."
+
+"The very thing!" cried Ma Norton.
+
+"Billy, you are a duck!" shrieked Lydia.
+
+"Gimme something to eat, Ma, before I go out to milk," said Billy, with
+a grin that struggled to be modest.
+
+Billy's suggestion proved indeed to be a happy one.  He was a willing
+pack horse and middleman for Lydia and though the demand for fudge was
+never overwhelming, Lydia by the end of May had cleared something over
+thirty-five dollars.
+
+Her joy over this method of earning money was not confined to its
+relation to her camping trip.  She saw herself helping to pay up their
+indebtedness to Levine, Marshall having made good his threat to call in
+the note.  She saw herself gradually developing an enormous trade that
+finally should demand a whole store for itself.  The store would
+develop into a candy factory.  The candy factory would grow into a
+business that would send Lydia, admired and famous, traveling about the
+world in a private yacht.
+
+In the meantime, she expended the whole of four dollars on a pair of
+buckskin outing boots and eight dollars on a little corduroy hunting
+coat and skirt.  When the clothes arrived from the Chicago mail order
+house, Amos, Lizzie and Lydia had an exciting hour.  Amos had brought
+the package home from town with him, and supper had been held back
+while Lydia tried on the clothes.  Amos and Lizzie smiled when the
+young girl pranced out before them.  The suit was cheap but well cut,
+with belt and pockets and welted seams.  The soft buckskin shoes fitted
+the slender calves like velvet.  With her bright cheeks and her yellow
+hair above the fawn-colored corduroy, Lydia looked half boy, half woman.
+
+"My soul, Lydia, they're just grand!" cried Lizzie.
+
+"What boys are going in that crowd?" demanded Amos.
+
+"Charlie and Kent and--Margery's mother's given in--'Gustus Bach.  I
+told you.  Daddy, don't you like the suit?"
+
+"Like it!" exclaimed Amos.  "Lydia, I'm stunned by it!  It makes me
+realize my little girl's growing up to be a pretty woman.  I wish I
+could have bought you your first suit myself, Lydia.  But on a dollar
+and a half a day, I swan--"
+
+The brightness suddenly left Lydia's face.  "Oh, Daddy," she exclaimed,
+"I'm a pig to spend all this money on myself!  You take the rest of the
+money, for the note."
+
+Amos gave a laugh that was half gay, half grim.  "Lydia, you spend
+every cent of that money on yourself.  You've earned it in more ways
+than one.  I wish John Levine could see you in it.  I guess he will
+though.  Congress will rest most of the summer.  Let's have supper now."
+
+Lydia spun through her Junior examination blissfully.  For once marks
+and final averages were of little importance to her.  For the week
+after school closed, she was going camping!
+
+Charlie and Kent were making all the camp preparations.  Miss Towne and
+the three girls were to be at Lydia's gate with their suitcases at nine
+o'clock of a Monday morning.  Other than this, they had received no
+orders.
+
+Amos had been very sober when he said good-by to Lydia, at half past
+six.  "It's your first trip, Lydia.  Don't do anything you wouldn't
+want your mother to see."
+
+Lydia looked at him wonderingly, then threw her arms about his neck.
+"Oh, Daddy, I don't want to go off and leave you two whole weeks!"
+
+"It's too late to back out now.  Go on and have a good time," said
+Amos, picking up his dinner pail.  Lydia watched him down the road.
+Suddenly she realized how lonely her father must be without her mother.
+
+"I oughtn't to go, Lizzie," she said.
+
+"Shucks!  Think of all you'll have to tell us when you get home.  Don't
+be a cry baby, child."
+
+Promptly at nine Charlie and Kent whirled up to the gate in a carryall.
+The driver was the same man who had moved the Dudley family five years
+before.  He greeted Lydia with a grin.
+
+"You've grow'd some, eh, Lydia?  Where's the rest of the women folks?"
+
+"Here come Miss Towne and Olga!" cried Kent.  "Margery'll be late, of
+course."
+
+At nine-fifteen Margery was driven up in state by Elviry, and at
+nine-twenty the carryall was off to the north in a cloud of dust,
+leaving Adam howling dismally at the gate.
+
+For fifteen miles the way led up and down hill over a dusty country
+road that wound for the most part past great wheat farms and grazing
+lands, vividly green under the June sky.  Here and there were woods of
+young oak and birch, self sowed, replacing the pine long since cleared
+off.  For the last five miles there were few farms.  The rolling hills
+disappeared and low lying lakes, surrounded by marshes took their
+places.  The young rice bordering the lakes was tenderly green and the
+marshes were like fields of corn with their thick growth of cat-tail.
+Beyond the marshes the hills rose again, with the road winding like a
+black ribbon over their curving bosoms into the vivid sky beyond.
+
+"Where the hills begin again, that's the reservation," said Charlie.
+
+"Where are the pines?" asked Lydia.  "I thought it was all pines."
+
+"You'll see plenty, before the trip's over.  Just beyond that group of
+buildings is the reservation line."
+
+The buildings Charlie pointed to were the first that had appeared in
+several miles.  A two-story, unpainted frame house with several barns
+and sheds comprised the group.  There was a sign on the front of the
+house.
+
+"Last Chance," read Margery, as they clattered by.  "For goodness'
+sake!" she giggled, "is it a hotel?"
+
+"Look at all the women!  One in every window!" cried Olga.  "Why, they
+must have a lot of maids!  Do people come up here in the summer, Kent?"
+
+Kent gave Miss Towne an appealing glance.
+
+"It's a miserable, disreputable place, girls," said the teacher.  "Why
+look at that when you have these beautiful hills before you?  How far
+into the reservation do we go, Charlie?"
+
+"About four miles.  It's where I camp every year.  Margery, did you
+bring some paper dolls?"
+
+Margery dimpled and tossed her head.  "I wonder how old I'll have to be
+before you realize I'm grown up, Charlie!"
+
+Charlie looked at her critically.  "Well, when you're eighteen, maybe."
+
+"Lydia'll be twenty-five before she gets through looking like a baby,
+but Olga's a young lady now," said Kent.  He was eying the girls with
+the air of a connoisseur.  "Three peaches, aren't they, Miss Towne?"
+
+"I don't see why you say three," objected Gustus.  "Ask me and say
+four."
+
+The young people laughed and looked at Miss Towne, half startled by
+Gustus' audacity.  Miss Towne herself was blushing and Olga exclaimed,
+"Why, Miss Towne, you _are_ good looking when you blush!  And I don't
+believe you're so frightfully old!"
+
+It was true.  Miss Towne in her outing blouse, a soft felt hat crushed
+down on her brown hair, which was now wind-tossed and loosened, her
+smooth skin flushed, her gray eyes full of laughter, did not look her
+frightful age of thirty-five.  In fact, she looked charmingly young.
+Her youthful charges looked her over with frank amazement.  It was a
+tradition in the school to fear and dislike Miss Towne.  Charlie had
+asked a number of teachers to act as chaperone before he had approached
+Miss Towne.  She too had at first refused, then had said, "Well, it's
+Lydia's first outing.  I'll do it for her sake.  But don't tell her I
+said so."  Charlie had kept his own counsel and Miss Towne had delayed
+her summer trip to Europe, for the camping trip on the reservation.
+
+"Thank you, children, you brighten my old age very much.  Look at the
+neat farms we are passing."
+
+"Indian farms," said Charlie.  "This one belongs to Chief Cloud."
+
+"Are there many Indian farms?" asked Lydia.
+
+"No, there's not much use for Indians to farm.  The Agent is their
+middleman, and he eats up all the profits."
+
+"For the Lord's sake, Charlie," protested Kent, "don't begin any
+funeral oration!  We're no investigating committee.  We're out for some
+fun."
+
+"Second the motion," said Gustus.  "Can I smoke, Miss Towne?"
+
+Miss Towne gave Gustus a clear look.  He was a tall, thin boy of
+seventeen, with the dark eyes of the Rhine German and with thin
+hawk-like features that went with his hollow chest.  His father was a
+rich brewer and Gustus, always elegantly dressed, was very popular with
+the girls.  Margery had insisted on his being invited.
+
+"If I were a boy with a chest like yours, I wouldn't smoke," said Miss
+Towne, "but do as you please."
+
+With a nonchalant "Thanks," Gustus lighted a cigarette.
+
+"Going to stay in training all summer, Charlie?" asked Kent.
+
+"Yes," grunted Charlie, "but next summer I'll be through with football,
+and I'll smoke my head off."
+
+"Oh! the pines!" shrieked Lydia.
+
+A sudden silence fell.  The road, curving around a hill, had without
+warning entered the pine woods.
+
+In every direction as far as the eye could pierce stretched brown,
+columnar aisles, carpeted with the brown of needles and the green of
+June undergrowth: aisle on aisle, green arch on green arch, flecked
+with sunshine, mighty trunks supporting great swaying boughs, drooping
+with their weight of needles.
+
+Except for a muffled thud of horses' hoofs, the carryall moved
+soundlessly for the road was thick carpeted with needles.
+
+The others fell to chatting again, but Lydia was too moved for words.
+The incense of the pines, their curious murmuring stillness, roused in
+her memories that were perhaps half racial.  She never had been in a
+pine wood before, yet the hushed sense of solemnity it wakened in her
+was perfectly familiar.  Its incense breathed to her secrets she never
+had known, never would understand, yet it seemed to her startled fancy
+that she had known and understood them, always.
+
+She was still in a half dream when the blue of a lake glimmered beyond
+the far aisles and the carryall drew up with a flourish before three
+tents set in the pines on the water's edge.
+
+Charlie and Kent had made their preparations well and they displayed
+them proudly.  They had rented the three old A tents from the agent, as
+well as the seven canvas cots, the dishes and the cooking utensils.
+The middle tent had been arranged with a rough slab-table and benches
+for a dining- and living-room.  The boys' tent with three cots and the
+girls' with four, were crowded but comfortable.
+
+"The Indian school is closed for the summer," explained Charlie, "and
+the Agent was glad to make a little money extra.  He'll pocket it, you
+bet.  Everything's clean," he added hastily in answer to Miss Towne's
+lifting eyebrows.  "Blankets, cots and all, even the hammocks yonder, I
+had scrubbed with soap and water.  I don't live with a doctor for
+nothing."
+
+"It's very nice, indeed, boys," said Miss Towne.  "Come girls, get out
+your aprons.  I suppose you're all starved."
+
+"Wait!  Wait!" cried Kent.  "That's not the way this camp's going to be
+run.  Charlie, Gustus and me do the cooking.  You ladies are company
+and don't have to do anything except wash the dishes and make your own
+beds."
+
+"Gee!" exclaimed Lydia.  "I'd rather cook than wash dishes, any day."
+
+"I never wash dishes," protested Margery.
+
+"I can't do it either," said Olga.
+
+"Can you boys really cook?" asked Miss Towne, in her sharp way.
+
+"Yes, _Ma'am_!" replied Kent.  "Charlie learned in the Indian school,
+even baking, you know, and he's taught me a lot.  Gustus can peel
+potatoes, clean fish and such stunts."
+
+Gustus groaned but made no protest.
+
+"I think it's a very nice arrangement," decided Miss Towne.  "Come
+girls, let's unpack and arrange the tent."
+
+Kent's statement proved no idle boast.  The boys could cook.  And
+though the fare was simple during the entire holiday consisting of
+fish, caught in the lake, potatoes, baking powder biscuits and
+occasional additions of canned stuff, it was well prepared and there
+was plenty of it.
+
+The little camp quickly settled into an orderly routine.  The girls
+wrangled among themselves about the dish-washing and Gustus was
+inclined to complain over the number of potatoes he was obliged to
+peel, but beyond this the camp work caused little friction.
+
+Miss Towne was well supplied with French books and made, the young
+folks thought, an ideal chaperone.  She was tired after her year's work
+and spent almost all her time in a hammock.  She saw to it that the
+girls were in bed by ten o'clock and that all were accounted for at
+meal time.  Apparently, beyond this, she left her charges to their own
+devices.  She had taught in the High School too long not to know that
+spying and nagging are more demoralizing than no chaperoning at all.
+
+There was a very early pairing off in the camp.  Kent devoted himself
+to Olga, Gustus to Margery and Charlie to Lydia.  Kent and Olga kept
+the camp supplied with fish.  Excepting at meal time and the bathing
+hour, they spent the day in a birchbark canoe on the lake.  Gustus and
+Margery were the least strenuous of the party and caused Miss Towne, as
+a consequence, more uneasiness than the rest.  They spent long hours
+sitting side by side in a hammock, talking, heaven knows of what!  In
+the evening when the camp-fire was lighted they were always being
+routed out of the shadows by the others and teased into joining the
+story telling and singing.
+
+Charlie undertook to show to Lydia the reservation as the Indians knew
+it.  If Lydia was a little puzzled by his eagerness to make her
+understand conditions on the reservation, she gave little thought to
+the riddle.  This adventure was affecting her deeply.  There was the
+sudden freedom and relaxation from home responsibilities.  There was
+the daily and intimate companionship with young people, than whom none
+were better dressed than she!--and there were the pines.
+
+She knew and loved the woods at home.  But they were second growth
+hardwood and birch, and had little in common with the splendor of the
+pines.  Waking early in the morning, she would creep from the tent and
+steal beyond sound and sight of the camp.  There in the cathedral
+beauty of the pines she would stand drawing deep breaths and staring as
+if her eyes must pierce through the outward solemn loneliness of the
+forest, to its deeper meaning.  She often wondered if in his search for
+God, John Levine had ever stood so.
+
+Tramping through the woods with Charlie, she did not talk much, nor did
+he.  They visited one or two neat Indian farms, but for the most part
+Charlie led her from one wick-i-up to the other, deep set in recesses
+of the wood, where the only whites to intrude on the Indians were the
+occasional government wood cruisers.  These wick-i-ups were hovels,
+usually in the last stages of poverty and desolation.  A squaw,
+braiding reed mats, a buck returning with a string of fish, a baby
+burrowing in the moss--all of them thin, ragged and dirty, and about
+them the hallowed beauty and silence of the primeval pines; this was
+the picture Lydia carried of most of the dwellers in these huts.
+Sometimes the wick-i-up was occupied by a solitary Indian, nearly
+always sick and always old.
+
+Once they came upon a white haired squaw crawling feebly from her
+doorway toward a fish that lay at the foot of a tree.  Charlie picked
+up the fish and he and Lydia helped the old woman back to her hut.  In
+the hut was an iron pot and a pile of reed mats.  That was all.
+
+"She says," explained Charlie, "that she's been sick all winter and
+she'd have starved to death only one of her neighbors drops a fish for
+her there, every day or so."
+
+"Let's get some food for her at the camp," said Lydia eagerly.
+
+Charlie shook his head.  "What's the use!  It would just prolong her
+agony.  She's nearly dead now.  The old can go.  It's the young ones'
+starving that hurts me."
+
+He led Lydia out and again they tramped through the long green aisles.
+It was later in the day that they came upon a wick-i-up where there
+were three children, besides the father and mother.  Two of the
+children were half blind with eye trouble.  The whole family was
+sitting in the sun, about a pot of fish.  The grown-ups chatted eagerly
+with Charlie, and he translated for Lydia.
+
+"They say it's been a fearful winter.  They only had ten dollars this
+year out of their Government allowance and they couldn't get work.
+They lived on fish and potatoes.  The Catholic priest gave them some
+wild rice.  The baby froze to death or starved, or both.  We'll bring
+some food over to these folks, Lydia, because there are kids--eh?"
+
+"But, Charlie, what's the Government allowance?"
+
+"Oh, didn't you know?--and you're one of the white lords of creation
+too!  The Government set aside this land for the Indians in solemn
+treaty with them, for ever and ever.  Then it deliberately sold off a
+big block of it and deposited the money at Washington.  The income from
+this was to be given to the Indians.  There's over two million dollars
+there.  But by the time it's filtered from Washington to the Indians,
+this is the result."  He nodded at the half-starved group about the
+fish pot.  "Damn the dirty, thieving whites," he said, quietly.
+
+Lydia had had four days of this.  As they made their way back to the
+camp for supper, she said to him, in an unsteady voice, "Charlie, I
+can't stand it!  Think of that baby that froze to death.  And all these
+beautiful woods are full of half-starved Indians!  Charlie, I can't
+stand it!"  And Lydia bowed her head on her arm and leaned against a
+tree trunk.
+
+"Good Lord, Lydia!" exclaimed Charlie, "I didn't want you to feel that
+bad!  I just wanted you to see, because you're Levine's friend and
+because I like you so much.  Please, don't cry!"
+
+"I'm not crying," Lydia lifted reddened eyes to his, "I was just
+thinking.  What can I do about it, Charlie?"
+
+"You can't do anything.  It's too late.  But I wanted you to see.  I
+don't care what girl understands as long as you do.  I think an awful
+lot of you, Lydia."
+
+He took Lydia's hand and patted it.  Lydia looked up at him, thrilled
+by his bronze beauty and the note in his voice.
+
+"If I were a white man," said Charlie, "I'd make you love me and marry
+me.  But I'm an Indian and sooner or later I'll go back to my people.
+I'm just making believe I can play the white man's game for a while."
+He eyed Lydia wistfully.  "But we'll be friends, eh, Lydia?--Always?
+Even if I go back to the wick-i-up, you'll be my friend?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Charlie, always," replied Lydia, earnestly, even while there
+flashed through her head the half whimsical thought, "Queer kinds of
+men want to be friends with me, Mr. Levine, Mr. Marshall, and Charlie.
+And they all hate each other!"
+
+After this episode, Charlie was less strenuous about showing Lydia
+Indian conditions.  That night he resumed a mild flirtation with Olga
+that he had dropped when school closed and Olga met him more than half
+way.
+
+"Wouldn't that come and get you!" growled Kent to Lydia as Charlie and
+Olga paddled away in the canoe, the next morning.  "Have you and
+Charlie had a fight?"
+
+"Nope," replied Lydia.  "But I got sick of investigating the
+reservation.  Are you and Olga mad at each other?"
+
+"Not so very!  Say, Lyd, let's kill time," Kent interrupted himself
+with a yawn, "with a tramp up to the settlement for some gum."
+
+Lydia stifled an elaborate yawn, at which Kent grinned.  "All right, I
+can stand it if you can," she said.  "Will you come along, Miss Towne?"
+
+Miss Towne, who had been highly edified by the morning's maneuvering
+shook her head and settled herself in her hammock.  "No eight mile walk
+for me.  I'm taking a rest cure.  Better wear a hat, Lydia.  You're
+getting dreadfully burned."
+
+"That's right.  Your nose is peeling something fierce," said Kent as
+they started off.
+
+"Huh, yours looks like a pickled beet," returned Lydia.  "Come on,
+pretend I'm Olga and be happy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE CAMP
+
+
+"The humans I have known lack root hold.  Perhaps that is why they die
+and leave no trace."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+There was no clear-cut trail between the camp and the settlement.  The
+settlement lay four miles northeast and there were little-used,
+needle-covered roads to be found that led here, there and everywhere,
+over which the initiated could find the way to the store.
+
+But Lydia and Kent did not want to use the roads.  It was with the old
+familiar sense of make believe adventure that they started on what they
+called a Bee-line southwest.  And it was mid-afternoon before, hungry
+and leg weary, they reached the store that backed up against the Indian
+school!
+
+They bought sardines, crackers and cheese and ate them perched on a dry
+goods box near the hitching rack.
+
+"There!  I feel happier," said Kent as he threw away the empty sardine
+cans.  "How are you, old lady?"
+
+Lydia swung her feet contentedly.  "Fine!  Let's start back.  We'll be
+there by supper time, I'm sure we know the way now."
+
+Kent nodded, offered Lydia a stick of gum, took one himself, put a huge
+supply in his pocket and they were off.
+
+But alas for the vanity of amateur woods-craftsmen!  The late June dusk
+found them still threading the endless aisles of pine, their sense of
+direction completely obscured by the sinking of the sun.
+
+"Scared, Lyd?" inquired Kent as they paused for a moment's rest on a
+log.
+
+"No, but I'm awful hungry and I've chewed gum till I'll scream if I see
+another piece.  We ought to come on another wick-i-up soon."
+
+"We've come on a dozen of them," grumbled Kent.  "If we could make the
+Indians understand where the camp is, it would be all right.  And I
+don't know what Charlie's Indian name is, so that doesn't help."
+
+Lydia drew a trifle closer on the log to Kent.  "Supposing we have to
+stay out here all night!"  She shivered a little.
+
+"Well, I'd light a fire," said Kent in a matter of fact manner that
+Lydia suspected was assumed, "and fix you up on a bed of pine needles.
+Then I'd stand guard all night, like a little tin hero."
+
+"No, we'd guard in turns," corrected Lydia.  "Kent, what's the use of
+starting on until the moon comes up?"
+
+"None at all," returned the boy.  "It's due about nine, isn't it!  I
+hope the folks won't worry about us.  In the meantime, you and I can
+have a good old talk, like the old days.  Remember?"
+
+It was entirely dark now in the woods.  Fireflies darted about.
+Crickets shrilled and an occasional owl hooted.  Lydia moved still
+closer to Kent, until his shoulder touched hers.
+
+"I remember!  Kent, are you afraid?"
+
+"I should say not!  I like the woods at night.  Don't the fern and the
+needles smell fine?  Lyd, what're you going to do after you finish High
+School?"
+
+"Go on to the University.  Aren't you?"
+
+"Dad wants me to, but I guess I'll go to work.  Why waste four years
+learning a lot of stuff that'll never earn me a cent?"
+
+"But you could take engineering, or law."
+
+"All lawyers are crooks and I've no head for figures.  I'm going into
+the real estate business.  There's real money in that, particularly if
+Levine gets his bill through.  What do you want to go to the University
+for?"
+
+"Kent, I promised Mother I'd go.  And I want to anyhow.  We're so poor,
+that I'll never be anything but a scrub woman if I don't get educated.
+And all our folks back East were college people, even if they were
+farmers--all but Dad.  He thought he was too smart to go to college."
+
+Kent stirred uncomfortably.  "I don't think I'm too smart, but I want
+to make money, quick."
+
+"I don't see what the hurry is.  Is it Olga?"
+
+"Of course it isn't Olga!  She's all right to flirt with and a peachy
+looker, but you don't suppose a fellow wants to marry every girl he
+gets crazy about!"
+
+"I didn't know," said Lydia, meekly.  "Nobody was ever crazy about me."
+
+"You aren't that kind, thank heaven.  If I ever catch you running round
+flirting, I'll slap your face."
+
+There was nothing humorous in Kent's tone, nevertheless Lydia giggled.
+"Lots you'd know about it when you don't see me for months at a time."
+
+"I'd know, never fear.  You're growing up the way a girl ought to.  I
+know all about it."
+
+Lydia sat, staring into the darkness, thinking this over.  She was
+getting an amount of comfort out of the conversation that made her
+realize how sore a spot there had been within her.
+
+"But why do you flirt?" she asked finally.
+
+"Aw, boys are that way.  You don't understand.  A fellow can't help
+flirting with girls like Margery and Olga--or any other old girl, as
+far as that goes."
+
+"Kent," asked Lydia, suddenly, "what's a hussy?"
+
+"Huh!" exclaimed Kent.  "What makes you ask that?"
+
+"What you said about flirting.  Election night there were lots of
+women, flashily dressed, around, and father said they were hussies.
+And I saw Gustus flirting with one of them, and some of the Senior
+boys, too.  And I saw some of the best dressed of the Indians with
+them."
+
+"You'd better ask your father," said Kent.
+
+"I did and he said I'd know when I got older."
+
+There was silence again.  The wind sighed through the pines, the
+crickets chirped, the all-hallowing scent of the pine enveloped them as
+if blown from some heavenly incense burner.  Kent was only seventeen.
+He sat staring with puzzled eyes into the darkness.  He tried to
+picture Olga putting a question like this to him, and failed.  A sudden
+realization of the loneliness of Lydia's unmothered girlhood, of her
+innocent faith in him, touched the best that was in him.  His voice was
+a little husky but he answered coolly.
+
+"A hussy, Lyd, is a flirt who's gone to the bad.  Those around Lake
+City chase after the students and the Indians who've got Government
+allowances, and get their money away from them."
+
+"Oh," said Lydia.  "Oh!"  Then thoughtfully, "Aren't men silly!"
+
+"Yes, they are," agreed Kent.  "And, Lyd, whenever you want to know
+about such things, you ask me.  It's a man's place to tell a girl the
+things she ought to know."
+
+"All right," replied Lydia, "and of course, you're just like a brother
+to me."
+
+"Oh, I don't feel so brotherly as--Gee, there's a fire, Lydia!"
+
+Faintly through the trees gleamed a distant blaze.  The two jumped to
+their feet and, weariness forgotten, started hastily toward it.
+
+"It's the camp crowd, I guess," said Lydia.
+
+"No, it isn't, it's a bunch of men," corrected Kent.  "Hold on a
+minute, Lydia.  Let's see what we're getting into."
+
+He pulled her into the shelter of a giant pine trunk and the two peered
+at the group around the fire.
+
+"Some kind of an Indian pow-wow, half breeds, mostly," whispered Kent.
+
+Lydia shivered.  "Don't they look fierce in the firelight," she
+murmured.  "Let's get out of here, Kent."
+
+"Shucks!  Be a sport, Lyd!  We'll watch them a minute, then I'll brace
+up and speak to 'em."
+
+There were six half breeds in "store" clothes and moccasins squatting
+around the blaze.  None of them was speaking.
+
+"They act as if they were waiting for some one," whispered Lydia, with
+some of the old thrill of pirate plays returning to her.  "Kent,
+they've all got guns!"
+
+"Hush!  There comes some one else.  For the love of cats!"
+
+John Levine emerged from the darkness of the forest into the fire glow.
+
+"How!" he grunted, slipping into an empty space, opposite the two
+eavesdroppers.
+
+"How," returned the Indians.
+
+Silence in the woods, except for the crackling fire.
+
+"Kent, let's go!  I don't want to listen, I don't want to know."  The
+cold sweat was standing on Lydia's forehead.
+
+Kent seized her arm.  "You've got to stay.  It's your business to
+know," he whispered sharply.
+
+"Where's Eagle's Feather?" asked Levine.
+
+"Sick," replied an Indian.
+
+John nodded.  "I got back from Washington today.  Big fight there.
+Marshall and his crowd, they'll make a big fight.  I may have to
+compromise.  I may make my bill read, only mixed bloods can sell their
+lands, not full bloods."
+
+"Good!" said an Indian.  "Full blood don't want to sell, anyhow."
+
+"Better for you mixed bloods," agreed Levine, "because you'll get
+higher prices for your land, but worse for us whites, for there'll be
+less land, unless--you mixed bloods should happen to swear the full
+bloods are mixed too."
+
+No one spoke for a minute, then a fat, yellow-faced half-breed laughed.
+"I'll swear old Chief Dawn had a white great-grandmother.  I'll get
+even with him, for throwing me out of the council."
+
+"Exactly," said Levine.  "It'll be a good way for all of you to pay up
+old debts.  Any of Marshall's men been up here lately?"
+
+After a pause, one of the younger Indians said, "Some young fellows
+been going through the woods measuring out a road and they acted like
+they was just out for a vacation when any one was around.  A year ago I
+see one of the fellows riding out with Marshall."
+
+Levine grunted.  Lydia's heart was pounding so hard that it really
+pained her.  She stared at John unbelievably.  Yet it was the same
+familiar, sallow face, with the gaunt look about the cheeks.  Only the
+eyes were strange.  Lydia had never seen them so hard, so searching
+before.  Kent was breathing deep and he did not loose his hold on her
+arm.
+
+"Well," said Levine, "is that all you folks have got to report, after
+six months?  What do you think I'm paying you for?"
+
+An old mixed blood, almost as dark as a full blood, removed his pipe
+from his mouth.  "All the shoes we buy this year made out of paper,
+cost four dollars, melt when they get wet.  Woman at Last Chance tell
+me Injun Agent tell her he gets those shoes from Marshall."
+
+"The hog!" grunted Levine.  "Anything more?"
+
+What more might have come Lydia did not know for an old squaw came
+tottering into the fire glow.  She was gray headed and emaciated.
+
+"Oh, that's our old squaw, Kent, remember?" whispered Lydia.
+
+"Shut up!" murmured Kent.
+
+The squaw made her way up to John.  There was something sinister in the
+look of her and he rose.
+
+"What you do now, white man," she snarled.  "Steal!  Steal more, eh?"
+
+Levine looked down on her and his voice was pitying.  "Why, you poor
+old devil, you look half starved."  He dug into his pocket and brought
+out a silver dollar.  "Go get some grub," he said.
+
+The old woman stared from the dollar to Levine's face and her voice
+rose to a shriek.
+
+"Steal!  Steal!  Make our young men drunk!  Make our young girls have
+babies that grow like these snakes," she pointed a trembling, scrawny
+finger at the scowling mixed bloods.  "White man--dirty fool--dirty
+thief," and she spat at Levine, at the same time striking the dollar
+from his hand.  It rolled out onto the needles and lay shining in the
+firelight.
+
+John stiffened and the mixed bloods watched him curiously.  But the
+squaw suddenly burst into the feeble yet deep drawn sobs of the old,
+and tottering over to the silver she picked it up.  "Hungry!" she
+sobbed.  "All the time much hungry."  And she started slowly away from
+the fire in the direction of Kent and Lydia's hiding-place.
+
+"Quick!" whispered Kent, and noiselessly the two ran back into the
+darkness of the woods, through which, however, a silver light was
+beginning to filter.  "There's the moon," he said in a low voice.  "Now
+I can find the lake."
+
+He took Lydia's hand and they hastened in silence toward the rising
+moon.  In less than half a mile they found the lake and far around its
+curving shore, the gleam of their own camp fire.
+
+"Holy Mike!  What do you think of that!" demanded Kent as they headed
+for the fire.  "Isn't Levine a wonder!"
+
+"Oh, Kent!" gasped Lydia.  "What shall we do!"
+
+"Do!" cried Kent.  "Why keep our mouths shut and see what happens.
+Lord, what an adventure!  Lyd, I wouldn't have missed this day for a
+hundred dollars!"
+
+Lydia scarcely heard him.  "John Levine!" she murmured.  "My best
+friend!  Oh, I can't believe it."
+
+"Shucks!  Why, that's life!  Gee, what rich pickings!  Me for the real
+estate business!"
+
+"Kent, it's stealing, just as my squaw said.  And it's just the
+meanest, dirtiest kind of stealing!"
+
+"It's nothing of the kind.  The whites have got to have that land and
+if a lot of sentimental grannies won't let us get it openly, we've got
+to get it quietly."
+
+They were nearing the camp now and Kent stopped and in the moonlight
+took Lydia by the shoulders.  "Look here, Lyd, don't you tell a soul
+about what we saw.  Promise me!"
+
+"I'll do nothing of the kind," snapped Lydia.
+
+The two stood staring at each other.  The lad, tall and broad, his dark
+face tense; the girl, slender, her fair hair shimmering, her eyes clear
+in the moonlight.
+
+"Promise!" repeated Kent.
+
+"I will not!" returned Lydia.
+
+Kent's hold on her shoulders tightened.  He wanted to box her ears and
+yet, as he gazed at the wistful, sensitive lips, he felt a sudden
+desire to kiss her.
+
+"Well, promise me, you'll say nothing while we're in camp, anyhow."
+
+Lydia hesitated.  After all, she thought, to whom could she tell the
+story and what could any one do!  "All right, I'll promise that," she
+agreed, slowly.
+
+Kent took his hands from her shoulders.  "Come on then, old lady.  Gee,
+this beats hanging poor old Florence Dombey under the willows.  Give me
+your hand and I'll tow you along."
+
+It was scarcely nine o'clock, after all, when they trudged into the
+camp.  Charlie and Gustus came in a moment later, having heard Miss
+Towne's call.
+
+"Oh, Lydia!  Lydia!  I've worried myself sick."  And the cruel Miss
+Towne, the grouchy Miss Towne, threw her arms about Lydia, with a
+little murmur that was curiously like a sob.
+
+"We were just going to the settlement for help," said Charlie, "though
+we were pretty sure nothing serious could have happened."
+
+"Of course nothing serious!" protested Kent.  "We were too smart to
+follow the roads and got lost going and coming.  We waited for the moon
+to come up and we haven't had anything to eat but chewing gum."
+
+"We saved your supper," said Margery.  "Come on, Gustus, we'll heat it
+for 'em."
+
+"Margery'd be a real human being, if she'd stay away from her mother,"
+observed Kent.  "For the love of Mike, let me sit down!"
+
+"Here, get in the hammock and let me fix the cushions for you!" cried
+Olga, who had been eying Lydia closely.
+
+"Thanks, I prefer the dining-room bench, right now," returned Kent.
+"Come on, Lyd.  Food!"
+
+Lydia was tired the next day and elected to stay in camp with Miss
+Towne while the others, including even Margery and Gustus, went on an
+all day strawberry hunt.
+
+Lydia lay in a hammock with a book all the morning, but the greater
+part of the time, Miss Towne observed, her eyes were fastened
+broodingly on the lake and not on the printed page.  The two went
+bathing alone, at noon, and afterward lay on the grassy shore, drying
+their hair.
+
+"Lydia, wasn't Kent nice to you, yesterday?" asked the chaperone,
+abruptly.
+
+Lydia turned a startled, sunburned face toward the questioner.  "Nice!
+Why, of course!  Kent's like my brother."
+
+"No man but a brother can be like a brother, my dear.  Always remember
+that.  What happened yesterday to worry you?"
+
+"Nothing that had anything to do with Kent.  Gosh!  I should say not!"
+
+"Lydia!" cried Miss Towne.  "Please don't use such dreadful language!
+If you knew how coarse it sounds!  Oh, my dear, I'm not trying to hurt
+your feelings," as she watched the scarlet face and quivering lips.
+"It's just that you are so fine, I can't bear to have you do anything
+that isn't fine.  I've been planning to talk to you for a long time
+about your slang.  Leave that sort of thing to Olga and the rest.  Use
+only the purest Anglo-Saxon.  Be a credit to your fine Puritan stock in
+speech.  You already are, in character."
+
+Lydia said nothing.  She sat struggling to keep back the tears when a
+horse's hoof beats sounded under the trees and Levine rode into the
+camp.
+
+Lydia had been wondering how, when she saw him in town, she was going
+to meet him, what she was going to say to him.  But now, her only
+thought was that here was the devoted friend who had understood her
+since babyhood.
+
+As he dismounted, she jumped to her feet.  "Oh, my dear Mr. Levine!  My
+dear!  My dear!" she cried and hair flying, she ran to him and threw
+her arms about his neck, burying her face against his rough corduroy
+coat.
+
+John threw a long arm about her, and held her to him closely, while
+with his free hand he smoothed back the glory of her hair.  And Miss
+Towne, watching, saw his long saturnine face transformed.
+
+"Why, Lydia, my little sweetheart!  I didn't realize you'd missed me
+so."  He held her silently for a moment, then, catching Miss Towne's
+gaze, he smiled.
+
+"Lydia has few loves, but they're strong," he said.  "I'm her foster
+father.  My name's John Levine."
+
+Lydia disengaged herself.  "And this is Miss Towne," she said, "my
+dearest teacher."
+
+"I've heard your praises sung for a long time," said Levine.
+
+"And I've heard Lydia sing yours," returned Miss Towne.
+
+"And no one else, I'll bet," laughed John.
+
+"Sit down," said the chaperone, with what dignity she could muster with
+her hair down her back, "while Lydia and I finish dressing."
+
+"You'll have lunch with us?" called Lydia as she retreated toward the
+tent.
+
+"Yes, but I can't stay longer.  Must be back in Lake City for supper,"
+replied Levine, tying up his horse.
+
+The luncheon was a success.  Lydia was delighted to put her hand to
+cooking again, and while Miss Towne set the table, John chatted with
+both of them of his Washington experiences.  He rode away immediately
+after he had finished eating.  Miss Towne wiped the dishes thoughtfully.
+
+"It's hard to realize that he's the scandalous John Levine," she said.
+"He's simply charming!"
+
+Lydia flared, flushed and subsided.  Never again, she realized, could
+she contradict aspersions cast on Levine's character.  And yet, how
+like a bad dream the episode of last night seemed.  If only it had been
+a dream!
+
+"You're not resentful still about my criticism of your slang using, are
+you, Lydia?" asked Miss Towne, anxiously.
+
+"No," muttered Lydia, "I deserved it."
+
+Miss Towne's face cleared.  "Well, then, tell me all about your friend.
+He interests me."
+
+Nothing could have soothed Lydia more in her half guilty feeling of
+having spied unfairly on John than to spend the rest of the afternoon
+in a history of his relationship to her family.
+
+Side by side in the hammock the two lay during the rest of the sunny
+summer afternoon, gazing up into the pines and talking of the curious
+personality that was making history for Lake City.  In after years,
+whenever she thought of Levine, Miss Towne's memory brought her two
+pictures--one of the tall, sardonic faced man clasping the golden
+haired girl in his arms.  The other was of pine boughs, murmuring sadly
+and persistently above the gentle flow of Lydia's young voice.
+
+That night the young people sat alone around the camp fire.  The
+chaperone complained of a headache and went to bed soon after supper.
+When she had disappeared, and the tent flap had dropped behind her,
+Gustus chanted softly,
+
+  "School's closed!
+  Teacher's dead!
+      Hooray!"
+
+and deliberately put his arm about Margery and kissed her.  Margery
+gave a little shriek but blushed and looked pleased and Gustus settled
+down with his head in her lap.  Margery sat looking into the fire, and
+smoothing Gustus' hair.
+
+Olga, who was sitting with Charlie on the opposite side of the blaze,
+her back against a log, arranged her skirts.  "Come on, Charlie," she
+said, with a glance at Kent.  And Charlie ensconced himself comfortably
+with his head on Olga's knee.
+
+Lydia, who was sitting with Kent, eyed this grouping with interest, and
+mingled with a little sense of shock and disapproval was just the least
+little feeling of regret that the boys didn't feel "crazy" about her.
+She was sitting bolt upright, with her cheeks flaming a little when she
+felt Kent's arm stealing round her.  She did not resist when he pulled
+her softly against him.  She was utterly surprised at the pleasurable
+sensation she experienced at having Kent's arm about her.  The others
+were singing but for once Lydia's throaty contralto did not join in.
+
+So this was spooning!  Of course, she wouldn't let anybody but Kent do
+this.  And what did it amount to, anyhow!  If this was all there was to
+spooning, why did people think it was wrong?
+
+Under cover of the singing, Kent giving her a little squeeze said,
+"Didn't think you were such a flirt, Lydia!  Let me put my head in your
+lap, will you?"
+
+"All right," said Lydia nonchalantly.  And presently she was smoothing
+Kent's hair, and he was holding her unoccupied hand.  It was the same
+crisp black hair Lydia had pulled in many a childish quarrel and Kent
+had held her hands many a time to keep her from slapping his face.  And
+yet there was a thrill about this!
+
+Kent evidently called this flirting.  Flirting!  Lydia began going back
+over the conversation with Kent that the eavesdropping episode had
+crowded from her thoughts.  Kent didn't respect girls that flirted and
+he told her he'd slap her if she flirted and yet, here he was!  Lydia
+went on smoothing the crisp hair, with the thin hand that had the
+callouses of hard work across the palm.
+
+The others were singing one of Lydia's favorite airs and she joined in.
+
+  "The thirst that from the soul doth rise
+  Doth ask a drink divine."
+
+She sang the words unthinkingly--and stopped.  John Levine was helping
+her in her search for God, and robbing and betraying the Indians as he
+did so!  And here was Kent, warning her against doing that which he was
+persuading her to do.  What was the matter with men!  Was there no
+trusting them?  And yet, she liked to "spoon" with Kent!
+
+"Oh," she thought, "I wish I knew more about men.  I wish I could ask
+Mother."
+
+And memory, like a gentle alarm clock rang its warning.  "Lydia," her
+father had said, "don't do anything you'd be ashamed to have your
+mother know."
+
+Lydia yawned and gave Kent's hair a little tweak.  "Get up, Kent, my
+foot's asleep," she said.
+
+Kent sat up.  The others sang on and Lydia said, "I thought you didn't
+want me to flirt."
+
+"I don't, but with me it's different!" replied Kent.
+
+Lydia jumped to her feet.  "You make me sick, Kent Moulton!" she
+snapped.  "All men make me sick.  I'm going to bed."  And she stalked
+off in her hunting boots, without a good night to any one.
+
+Kent looked after her with an expression half sheepish, half admiring.
+
+"What's the matter with Lyd?" asked Olga.
+
+"Doesn't care about the spooning bee," replied Kent.
+
+"Proper is Lydia's middle name," commented Gustus.
+
+"Lydia is absolutely O. K.," said Charlie.
+
+"Bet your life," agreed Kent.  "Get your big head over, Gustus, and
+give me a piece of Margery's knee."
+
+"Darn it," said Charlie, "Lydia's left the tent flap up.  We might as
+well go to bed."
+
+Which, after another song or two, they did.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LYDIA GIGGLES
+
+
+"Nature is neither cruel nor sad.  She is only purposeful, tending to
+an end we cannot see."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+The days flew lightly by, lightly for Lydia, too, in spite of the heavy
+secret she carried of Levine's plotting.  Lightly, in spite of the fact
+that Lydia was undergoing some soul-changing experiences in this short
+holiday, experiences that were to direct her life's course.
+
+The day before they broke camp, Lydia's old squaw appeared and asked
+for Charlie Jackson.
+
+Charlie and Kent were cooking dinner.
+
+"Dear me," said Miss Towne, "tell him to take the poor thing away,
+Lydia."
+
+"He must feed her, first," exclaimed Lydia, leading the old Indian over
+to the cooking shelter.
+
+Kent and Lydia exchanged glances as Charlie led the squaw--Susie, he
+called her--into the woods, after Lydia had heaped her old arms with
+food.  Kent and Gustus had put the dinner on the table and they all
+were seated at the meal when Charlie returned.
+
+"What did she want, Charlie?" asked Olga.
+
+"You wouldn't care if I told you," replied Charlie, grimly.  "But," he
+burst forth suddenly, "some day you whites will pay.  Some day the Japs
+or the Jews will do to you Americans what you've done to us."
+
+"Who cares!" cried Olga, pertly.  "Have a pickle, Charlie, and cheer
+up."  She pushed the pickle dish toward him.
+
+"Or some catsup," suggested Gustus, depositing the bottle by Charlie's
+plate.
+
+"Or a sardine," added Margery.
+
+Charlie's lips twitched and he smiled and Miss Towne sighed in a
+relieved way.  The meal progressed without a further crisis.
+
+After the dishes were done, Kent followed Lydia, who was strolling off
+for a last walk in the woods.
+
+"Do you suppose she told Charlie about Levine?" he asked, as he
+overtook her.
+
+"Look out, Charlie's coming," said Lydia and in a moment the Indian had
+joined them.
+
+"Look here, Lydia," he began, "Levine is up to some new cussedness.
+Old Susie came on him in council the other night with six of the worst
+half breeds in the reservation.  She lost her head and began to jaw him
+so she didn't find out what it was about.  And he's getting the last of
+my timber now.  Lydia, you've _got_ to help me.  When you get home,
+talk to Levine."
+
+"Getting the last of your timber!" exclaimed Kent.
+
+"Yes, the law lets 'em get the 'dead and down' stuff and who's going to
+swear it's fresh stuff that he cut this summer and will get out next
+winter?"
+
+"Do you mean he's up cutting your pines now?" cried Lydia, aghast.
+
+"No!  No!" impatiently.  "His half breeds do that."
+
+"But how does he come to be taking your wood?  Why don't you go to see
+him yourself?" asked Kent.
+
+"I can't answer either of those questions," replied Charlie, sullenly.
+
+The two young whites thought of the attack on Levine, and looked at
+each other apprehensively.
+
+"Won't the Indian Agent stop him?" asked Lydia.
+
+"He!  Why, he's deep in the mire himself with Dave Marshall.  My God,
+Margery Marshall went to New York on a blind Indian boy's pines!
+Lydia, save my pines for me!  They belong to my tribe.  My father kept
+them and so did his father for his people.  As long as they had those
+miles of pines, they had a place for the tribe to live.  Father was
+going to Washington three years ago to tell the president about the
+graft when they shot him from ambush.  If I put up a fight, they'll
+shoot me.  My father wanted me to learn white ways so I could protect
+the tribe.  And the more I learn of white ways the more I realize I'm
+helpless.  Lydia, won't you help us?"
+
+Neither Kent nor Lydia ever had seen Charlie thus before.  He was
+neither arrogant nor sullen.  He was pleading with a tragic
+hopelessness that moved his two hearers profoundly.
+
+"Oh, Charlie!  I _will_ try," cried Lydia.  "I truly will."
+
+"I knew you would," said Charlie, huskily, and he turned back abruptly
+to the camp.
+
+"Gee!" exclaimed Kent.  "Chapter number two!"
+
+Lydia stamped her foot.  "How can you speak so, Kent!  It's a frightful
+thing!"
+
+"Sure it's frightful, but it can't be helped.  The whites have got to
+have this land.  Might's right."
+
+"What makes the whites so crazy for it?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Money," returned Kent.
+
+Lydia stared about her.  Supposing, she thought, that she owned a
+hundred acres of this pine land.  She forgot Kent and concentrated
+every force of her mind on sensing what land ownership would mean.  And
+suddenly there woke in her, her racial hunger for land.  Suddenly there
+stirred within her a desire for acreage, for trees, soil, stream and
+shrub, a wide demesne that should be hers and her children's forever.
+She was still too young to trace the hunger back to its primal source,
+the desire for permanency, the yearning to possess that which is the
+first and the last of existence, which neither moth nor dust can
+corrupt nor thieves break through and steal.  But somewhere back in her
+still childish mind a lust for a wide domain of pine land bestirred
+itself to begin battle with the sense of right and justice that her
+heart of hearts told her Levine was outraging.
+
+"Are you really going to talk to Levine?"  Kent roused her from her
+reverie.
+
+"Yes!  Didn't I promise to?"
+
+"Lots of good it'll do," grunted Kent.  "And if you tell him we
+overheard him in the woods, I'll be sore."
+
+"I don't see why."
+
+"Because, after I finish High School, I'm going to tell him I know, to
+make him let me in on the deal.  Look here, Lyd, don't tell him I was
+with you, anyhow."
+
+"Oh, all right," replied Lydia, crossly.  "For goodness' sake, don't
+let's talk about it any more.  I don't see why men always have to be
+plotting!  I'm going back to camp and help pack."
+
+The driver arrived with the carryall at nine o'clock the next morning,
+and at mid-afternoon, Lydia was dropped at the gate, where Adam took
+possession of her.  It was earlier than she had been expected, and
+Lizzie had not returned from her Saturday marketing.  Lydia lugged her
+suitcase up the path, glad to be at home, yet murmuring to herself a
+little disconsolately.
+
+"Nothing to look forward to now, but school in the fall."
+
+The house seemed small and dingy to her, after the open splendor of the
+pine woods.  Old Lizzie had "let things go" and the rooms were dusty
+and disorderly.  Lydia dropped her suitcase in the kitchen.
+
+"I've just got to train old Lizzie," she said, "so that she won't leave
+her old carpet slippers and her apron in the middle of the kitchen
+every time she goes out.  And Dad just must quit leaving his pipe on
+the dining-room table.  I do wish we had Mission furniture instead of
+this everlasting old mahogany.  I just guess there's got to be some
+reforming in this house, this summer.  If I've got to leave off slang,
+Dad and Lizzie can leave off a few of their bad habits."
+
+She carried the suitcase on into her bedroom and Lizzie, coming in, hot
+and bundle-laden an hour later, found the living-room in immaculate
+order and Lydia, in an old dress, blacking the kitchen stove.
+
+"For the land's sake, child," said Lizzie as Lydia kissed her and took
+her bundles from her, "how tanned you are!  And you shouldn't have
+begun work the minute you got home."
+
+"I had to.  I couldn't stand the dirt," answered Lydia, briskly.  "Is
+Daddy all right?  You'll find your slippers where they belong, Lizzie."
+
+The old lady, in her rusty black alpaca which she always wore to town,
+gave Lydia a look that was at once reproachful and timid.  Lydia had
+shown signs lately of having reached the "bringing up the family" stage
+of her development and Lizzie dreaded its progress.
+
+Amos came in the gate shortly after six.  Lydia was waiting for him at
+the front door.  He looked suddenly shabby and old to Lydia and she
+kissed him very tenderly.  It required all the supper hour and all the
+remainder of the evening to tell the story of the camp and to answer
+Lizzie's and Amos' questions.  There were several episodes Lydia did
+not describe; that of the half breed council in the wood, for example,
+nor the "spooning" with Kent.
+
+It was ten o'clock when Amos rose with a sigh.  "Well, you had a good
+time, little girl, and I'm glad.  But I swan, I don't want you ever to
+go off again without me and Liz and Adam.  Adam howled himself to sleep
+every night and I'd 'a' liked to.  I'm going out to see if the chickens
+are all right."
+
+"I got everything that belongs to you mended up, Lydia," said Lizzie,
+following into the kitchen bedroom.
+
+Lydia looked from the gnarled old hands to the neat rolls of stockings
+on the bureau.  She had been wishing that Lizzie was a neat maid with a
+white apron!  A sense of shame overwhelmed her and she threw her arms
+about her kind old friend.
+
+"Lizzie, you're a lot too good to me," she whispered.
+
+Lydia was sitting on the front steps, the next afternoon, with a book
+in her lap and Adam at her feet, when Billy Norton called.  He stopped
+for a chat in the garden with her father, before coming up to greet
+Lydia.
+
+"He is awful homely.  A regular old farmer," she thought, comparing him
+with the elegant Gustus and with Kent's careless grace.
+
+Billy was in his shirtsleeves.  His blond hair was cropped unbecomingly
+close.  Lydia did not see that the head this disclosed was more finely
+shaped than either of her friends.  He was grinning as he came toward
+Lydia, showing his white teeth.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!  Awful glad you're back!"
+
+He sat down on the step below her and Lydia wrinkled her nose.  He
+carried with him the odor of hay and horses.
+
+"How's your mother?" asked Lydia.  "I'm coming over, to-morrow."
+
+"Mother's not so very well.  She works too hard at the blamed canning.
+I told her I'd rather never eat it than have her get so done up."
+
+"I'll be over to help her," said Lydia.  "We had a perfectly heavenly
+time in camp, Billy."
+
+"Did you?" asked her caller, indifferently.  "Hay is fine this year.
+Never knew such a stand of clover."
+
+"Miss Towne was grand to us.  And Kent and Charlie are the best cooks,
+ever."
+
+"Great accomplishment for men," muttered Billy.  "Are you going to try
+to sell fudge, this winter, Lyd?"
+
+"I don't know," Lydia's tone was mournful, "Daddy hates to have me.
+Now I'm growing up he seems to be getting sensitive about my earning
+money."
+
+"He's right too," said Billy, with a note in his voice that irritated
+Lydia.
+
+"Much you know about it!  You just try to make your clothes and buy
+your school books on nothing.  Dad's just afraid people'll know how
+little he earns, that's all.  Men are selfish pigs."
+
+Astonished by this outburst, Billy turned round to look up at Lydia.
+She was wearing her Sunday dress of the year before, a cheap cotton
+that she had outgrown.  The young man at her feet did not see this.
+All he observed were the dusty gold of her curly head, the clear blue
+of her eyes and the fine set of her head on her thin little shoulders.
+
+"You always look just right to me, Lyd," he said.  "Listen, Lydia.  I'm
+not going to be a farmer, I'm--"
+
+"Not be a farmer!" cried Lydia.  "After all you've said about it!"
+
+"No!  I'm going in for two years' law, then I'm going into politics.  I
+tell you, Lydia, what this country needs to-day more than anything is
+young, clean politicians."
+
+"You mean you're going to do like Mr. Levine?"
+
+"God forbid!" exclaimed the young man.  "I'm going to fight men like
+Levine.  And by heck," he paused and looked at Lydia dreamily, "I'll be
+governor and maybe more, yet."
+
+"But what's changed you?" persisted Lydia.
+
+"The fight about the reservation, mostly.  There's something wrong, you
+know, in a system of government that allows conditions like that.  It's
+against American principles."
+
+His tone was oratorical, and Lydia was impressed.  She forgot that
+Billy smelled of the barnyard.
+
+"Well," she said, "we'd all be proud of you if you were president, I
+can tell you."
+
+"Would you be!"  Billy's voice was pleased.  "Then, Lydia, will you
+wait for me?"
+
+"Wait for you?"
+
+"Yes, till I make a name to bring to you."
+
+Lydia flushed angrily.  "Look here, Billy Norton, you don't have to be
+silly, after all the years we've known each other.  I'm only fifteen,
+just remember that, and I don't propose to wait for any man.  I'd as
+soon think of waiting for--for Adam, as for you, anyhow."
+
+Billy rose with dignity, and without a word strode down the path to the
+gate and thence up the road.  Lydia stared after him indignantly.
+"That old _farmer_!" she said to Adam, who wriggled and slobbered,
+sympathetically.
+
+She was still indignant when John Levine arrived and found her toasting
+herself and the waffles for supper, indiscriminately.  Perhaps it was
+this sense of indignation that made her less patient than usual with
+what she was growing to consider the foibles of the male sex.  At any
+rate, she precipitated her carefully planned conversation with Levine,
+when the four of them were seated on the back steps, after supper,
+fighting mosquitoes, and watching the exquisite orange of the afterglow
+change to lavender.
+
+The others were listening to Lydia's account of her investigating tour
+with Charlie.
+
+"I shouldn't say it was the best idea in the world for you to be
+wandering through the woods with that young Indian," was Levine's
+comment when Lydia had finished.
+
+"I don't see how you can speak so," cried Lydia, passionately, "when
+this minute you're taking his pine wood."
+
+"Lydia!" said Amos, sharply.
+
+"Let her alone, Amos," Levine spoke quietly.  "What are you talking
+about, Lydia?"
+
+For a moment, Lydia sat looking at her friend, uncertain how much or
+how little to say.  She had idealized him so long, had clung so long to
+her faith in his perfection, that a deep feeling of indignation toward
+him for not living up to her belief in him drove her to saying what she
+never had dreamed she could have said to John Levine.
+
+"The Indians are people, just like us," she cried, "and you're treating
+them as if they were beasts.  You're robbing them and letting them
+starve!  Oh, I saw them!  Charlie showed the poor things to me--all
+sore eyes, and coughing and eating dirt.  And you're making money out
+of them!  Maybe the very money you paid our note with was made out of a
+starved squaw.  Oh, I can't stand it to think it of you!"
+
+Lydia paused with a half sob and for a moment only the gentle ripple of
+the waves on the shore and the crickets were to be heard Levine, elbow
+on knee, chin in hand, looked through the dusk at the shadowy sweetness
+of Lydia's face, his own face calm and thoughtful.
+
+"You're so good and kind to me," Lydia began again, "how can you be so
+hard on the Indians?  Are you stealing Charlie's logs?  _Are_ you, Mr.
+Levine?"
+
+"I bought his pine," replied Levine, quietly.
+
+"He doesn't believe it.  He thinks you're stealing.  And he's so afraid
+of you.  He says if he makes a fuss, you'll shoot him.  Why does he
+feel that way, Mr. Levine?"
+
+Lydia's thin hands were shaking, but she stood before the Congressman
+like a small accusing conscience, unafraid, not easily to be stilled.
+
+"Lydia!  What're you saying!" exclaimed Amos.
+
+"Keep out, Amos," said Levine.  "We've got to clear this up.  I've been
+expecting it, for some time.  Lydia, years ago before the Government
+began to support the Indians, they were a fine, upstanding race.  The
+whites could have learned a lot from them.  They were brave, and
+honorable, and moral, and in a primitive way, thrifty.  Well, then the
+sentimentalists among the whites devised the reservation system and the
+allowance system.  And the Indians have gone to the devil, just as
+whites would under like circumstances.  Any human being has to earn
+what he eats or he degenerates.  You can put that down as generally
+true, can't you, Amos?"
+
+"You certainly can," agreed Amos.
+
+"Now, the only way to save those Indians up there is to kick them out.
+The strong ones will live and be assimilated into our civilization.
+The weak ones will die, just like weak whites do."
+
+"But how about Charlie's pines?" insisted Lydia.
+
+Something like a note of amusement at the young girl's persistence was
+in John's voice, but he answered gravely enough.
+
+"Yes, I've bought his pines and I'll get them out, next winter.
+There's no denying we want the Indians' land.  But there's no denying
+that throwing the Indian off the reservation is the best thing for the
+Indian."
+
+"But what makes Charlie think you're stealing them?  And he says that
+when the pines go, the tribe will die."
+
+"I paid for the pine," insisted Levine.  "An Indian has no idea of
+buying and selling.  It's a cruel incident, this breaking up of the
+reservation, but it's like cutting off a leg to save the patient's
+life.  Sentiment is wasted."
+
+"That's the great trouble with America, these days," said Amos, his
+pipe bowl glowing in the summer darkness.  "All these foreigners coming
+in here filled the country with gush.  What's become of the New
+Englanders in this town?  Well, they founded the University, named the
+streets, planted the elms and built the Capitol.  Since then they've
+been snowed under by the Germans and the Norwegians, a lot of beer
+drinkers and fish eaters.  Nobody calls a spade a spade, these days.
+They rant and spout socialism.  The old blood's gone.  The old, stern,
+puritanical crowd can't be found in America to-day."
+
+Lydia was giving little heed to her father.  Amos was given to fireside
+oratory.  She was turning over in her mind the scene in the woods
+between John and the half breeds.  That then was a part of the process
+of removing the patient's leg!  The end justified the means.
+
+She heaved a great sigh of relief.  "Well, then, I don't have to worry
+about that any more," she said.  "Only, I don't dare to think about
+those starving old squaws, or the baby that froze to death."
+
+"That's right,"  agreed Levine, comfortably.  "Don't think about them."
+
+Old Lizzie snored gently, gave a sudden sigh and a jerk.  "Land!  I
+must have dozed off for a minute."
+
+Lydia laughed.  "It was nip and tuck between you and Adam, Lizzie.
+Let's get in away from the mosquitoes--I'm so glad I had this talk with
+you, Mr. Levine."
+
+"Lydia should have been a boy," said Amos; "she likes politics."
+
+"I'd rather be a girl than anything in the world," protested Lydia, and
+the two men laughed.  If there was still a doubt in the back of Lydia's
+mind regarding the reservation, for a time, at least, she succeeded in
+quieting it.  She dreaded meeting Charlie and was relieved to hear that
+Dr. Fulton had taken him East with him for a couple of weeks to attend
+a health convention.
+
+One of the not unimportant results of the camping trip was that Lydia
+rediscovered the pine by the gate.  It was the same pine against which
+she had beaten her little fists, the night of Patience's death.  She
+had often climbed into its lower branches, getting well gummed with
+fragrant pitch in the process.  But after her return from the
+reservation, the tall tree had a new significance to her.
+
+She liked to sit on the steps and stare at it, dreaming and wondering.
+Who had left it, when all the rest of the pines about it had been
+cleared off?  How did it feel, left alone among the alien oaks and with
+white people living their curious lives about it?  Did it mourn, in its
+endless murmuring, for the Indians--the Indians of other days and not
+the poor decadents who shambled up and down the road?  For the Indians
+and the pines were now unalterably associated in Lydia's mind.  The
+life of one depended on that of the other.  Strange thoughts and
+perhaps not altogether cheerful and wholesome thoughts for a girl of
+Lydia's age.
+
+So it was probably well that Margery about this time began to show
+Lydia a certain Margery-esque type of attention.  In her heart, in
+spite of her mother's teachings, Margery had always shared her father's
+admiration for Lydia.  In her childhood it had been a grudging, jealous
+admiration that seemed like actual dislike.  But as Margery developed
+as a social favorite and Lydia remained about the same quiet little
+dowd, the jealousy of the banker's daughter gave way to liking.
+
+Therefore several times a week, Margery appeared on her bicycle, her
+embroidery bag dangling from the handle bars.  The two girls would then
+establish themselves on cushions by the water, and sew and chatter.
+Lizzie, from the kitchen or from the bedroom where she was resting,
+could catch the unceasing sound of voices, broken at regular intervals
+by giggles.
+
+"Lydia's reached the giggling age," she would say to herself.  "Well,
+thank the Lord she's got some one to giggle with, even if Margery is a
+silly coot.  There they go again!  What are they laughing at?"
+
+Hysterical shrieks from the lawn, with the two girls rolling helplessly
+about on the cushions!  Overhearing the conversation would not have
+enlightened old Lizzie, for the girls' talk was mostly reminiscent of
+the camp experiences or of their recollections of Kent's little
+boyhood, of Charlie's prowess at school, or of Gustus' "sportiness" and
+his fascinating deviltry.  Lydia was enjoying the inalienable right of
+every girl of fifteen to giggle, and talk about the boys, the two
+seemingly having no causative relation, yet always existing together.
+
+Lizzie had not realized how quiet and mature Lydia had been since
+little Patience's death until now.  She would mix some lemonade and
+invite the girls into the house to drink it, just for the mere pleasure
+of joining in the laughter.  She never got the remotest inkling of why
+the two would double up with joy when one or the other got the
+hiccoughs in the midst of a sentence.  But she would lean against the
+sideboard and laugh with them, the tears running down her old cheeks.
+
+It was no uncommon occurrence during this summer for Amos to come on
+the two, giggling helplessly on a log by the roadside.  Lydia would
+have been walking a little way with Margery to come back with her
+father, when their mirth overcame them.  Amos had no patience with this
+new phase of Lydia's development.
+
+"For heaven's sake," he said to John Levine, one Sunday afternoon, when
+hysterical shrieks drifted up from the pier, "do you suppose I'd better
+speak to Doc Fulton or shut her up on bread and water?"
+
+"Pshaw, let her alone.  It's the giggles!  She's just being normal,"
+said John, laughing softly in sympathy as the shrieks grew weak and
+maudlin.
+
+The two did have lucid intervals during the summer, however.  During
+one of these, Lydia said, "I wish we had hard wood floors like yours."
+
+"What kind are yours?" inquired Margery.
+
+"Just pine, and kind of mean, splintery pine, too."
+
+"Upstairs at Olga's all the floors were that way," said Margery, "and
+they had a man come and sandpaper 'em and put kind of putty stuff in
+the cracks and oil and wax 'em and they look fine."
+
+"Gee!" said Lydia, thoughtfully.  "That is, I don't mean 'Gee,' I mean
+whatever polite word Miss Towne would use for 'Gee.'"
+
+The girls giggled, then Lydia said, "I'll do it!  And I'll cut our old
+living-room carpet up into two or three rugs.  Lizzie'll have to
+squeeze enough out of the grocery money for fringe.  I'd rather have
+fringe than a fall coat."
+
+Amos, coming home a night or so later found the living-room floor bare
+and Lydia hard at work with a bit of glass and sand paper, scraping at
+the slivers.
+
+"Ain't it awful?" asked Lizzie from the dining-room.  "She would do it."
+
+Lydia's knees and back had given out and she was lying on her stomach
+and one elbow, scraping away without looking up.
+
+"Lizzie's complained all day," she said.  "She doesn't realize how our
+house looks like 'poverty and destruction' compared with other folks.
+I'm going to get some style into it, if I have to tear it down.  Oh,
+Daddy, don't you get sick of being poor?"
+
+"Yes," said Amos, shortly, "and I think you're a silly girl to wear
+yourself out on this kind of thing."
+
+Lydia sat up and looked at him.  She was growing fast and was thinner
+than ever, this summer.  "If mother was alive," she said, "she'd know
+exactly how I feel."
+
+Suddenly there came to Amos' memory a weak and tender voice, with
+contralto notes in it like Lydia's, "Lydia's like me, Amos.  You'll
+never have trouble understanding her, if you'll remember that."
+
+"Lydia," he said, abruptly, "make the house over if you want to, my
+dear," and he marched out to the kitchen to wash and take off his
+overalls.
+
+It took Lydia several days to complete her task.  When it was done the
+cracks were still prominent and the oily finish was spotted.  But in
+Lydia's eyes it was a work of art and she cut the old carpet into three
+parts with enthusiasm.  She sewed the fringe on the rugs, on the front
+porch.  Sitting so, she could see Margery when she appeared far down
+the road, could view the beauty of the Nortons' wide fields, and could
+hear the quiet sighing of the pine by the gate.  On the afternoon on
+which she finished the last of the rugs, Charlie Jackson and not
+Margery appeared.  Lydia's heart sank a little as he turned in the
+gate, though in his greeting he seemed his usual genial self.
+
+He admired the rugs and the gleam of the shining floor through the
+doorway.  Then without preamble, he asked, "Did you talk to Levine,
+Lydia?"
+
+"Yes," she said.  "He--he just doesn't see it any way but his, Charlie!"
+
+The young Indian's face fell.  "I certainly thought you could influence
+him, Lydia.  Did you really try?"
+
+"Of course I tried," she exclaimed, indignantly.  "He insists that the
+only way to save you Indians is to make you work for a living."
+
+"He's doing it all for our good, huh?" sneered Charlie.
+
+"He doesn't pretend.  He says he wants the land.  He's paying for it
+though."
+
+"Paying for it!" cried the Indian.  "How's he paying, do you know?"
+
+"No, and I don't want to know!  I'm tired of hearing things against Mr.
+Levine."
+
+"I don't care if you are," said Charlie, grimly.  "If you're going to
+keep on being his friend, you've got to be it with your eyes open.  And
+you might as well decide right now whether you're going to take him or
+me for your friend.  You can't have us both."
+
+"I wouldn't give up Mr. Levine for any one on earth."  Lydia's voice
+shook with her earnestness.  "And I don't see why I have to be dragged
+into this business.  I've nothing to do with it."
+
+"You have too!  You're white and it's every white's business to judge
+in this.  You'll be taking some of the profits of the reservation if
+it's thrown open, yourself."
+
+"I will not!" cried Lydia.  "I wouldn't want an inch of that land."
+Then she caught her breath.  Something within her said, "Wouldn't,
+eh--not the vast acres of cathedral pines, you thought of as yours, at
+camp?"  She flushed and repeated vehemently, "Not an inch!"
+
+Charlie smiled cynically.  "Listen, Lydia, I'll tell you how Levine
+pays for his Indian lands."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR
+
+
+"Where the pine forest is destroyed, pines never come again."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia sighed helplessly and began to stitch again on the fringe,
+thrusting her needle in and out viciously.
+
+"Years ago," began Charlie, grimly, "my father foresaw what the whites
+were trying to do.  None of the other full bloods believed him.  He had
+nothing to do with half-breeds."
+
+"I don't see why you always speak so of the mixed bloods," interrupted
+Lydia.  "Their white blood ought to improve them."
+
+"It ought, yes,--but it doesn't.  And the reason is that only the
+rottenest kind of a white man'll make a squaw a mother.  And only the
+low harpies in places like Last Chance will let an Indian father a
+child."
+
+Lydia flushed but compressed her lips and let Charlie speak on.  She
+knew that it was useless to try to stem the tide of protest that was
+rising to his lips.
+
+"Father was the chief of the tribe and he called council after council
+until at last they all decided he'd better go to Washington and see if
+he could get help from the Indian Commissioner.  Even then John Levine
+had a following of half-breeds.  He told the yellow curs to kidnap my
+father and he'd see if he could make him more reasonable.  So the
+half-breeds laid in ambush the day father started for Washington.
+Father put up an awful fight and they killed him!"
+
+"Oh, Charlie!" cried Lydia, dropping her sewing.  "Oh, Charlie!"
+
+"Yes," said the Indian, tensely, "and though Levine wasn't there he was
+just as much my father's murderer as if he'd fired the shot.  Of
+course, nothing was ever done by the authorities.  It was hushed up as
+an Indian brawl.  But my sister, she was twenty then, she found out
+about Levine and she came in and set fire to his house one night,
+thinking she'd burn him to death.  Instead of that, she just scared his
+old hired man who was drunk.  Levine was away from home.  But he's a
+devil.  He found out it was my sister and he told her the only way she
+could keep from being jailed was to sell him all our pines--for a
+hundred dollars.  So she did, but she shot at him that Thanksgiving
+night when he'd been at your house."
+
+"Oh, _Charlie_!" whispered Lydia, horror in her blue eyes and her
+parted lips.  She looked at him in utter dismay.  No longer was he the
+debonair favorite of the High School.  In his somber eyes, his thin
+cold lips, his tense shoulders, the young girl saw the savage.  She
+looked from Charlie to the familiar garden, to Adam, scratching fleas,
+and beyond to the quiet herds in the Norton meadows.  Surely Charlie's
+tale of killings had no place in this orderly life.  Then her glance
+fell upon the pine beside the gate.  It murmured softly.  Again Lydia
+saw the cloistered depths of the reservation pines and again there
+stirred within her that vague lust for ownership.  And she knew that
+Charlie's tale was true.
+
+She moistened her dry lips.  "But what can I do, Charlie!  I'm only a
+girl."
+
+"I'll tell you what you can do.  You can throw down your murderer
+friend and side with me.  You can get every one you know to side with
+me.  And, Lydia, never tell Levine, or any one else, what you know
+about him.  It wouldn't be safe!"
+
+He leaned toward her as he spoke and Lydia shivered.  "I won't," she
+whispered.  Then she said aloud in sudden resentment, "But I'm not
+going to throw Mr. Levine down without his having a chance to explain.
+Who are you to think you've got a right to ask me?"
+
+Charlie caught her slender wrist in a firm grasp.  "I'm a human being
+fighting for justice--no--fighting for existence.  That's who I am."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to know about it!" cried Lydia.  "I don't want to
+think about it!  I'm just a girl.  I want to be happy just a little
+while before I grow up.  I've had too much unhappiness."
+
+"Yes, you have had," agreed Charlie, grimly, "and that's why you will
+think about it in spite of yourself.  You understand how I feel because
+you've suffered.  When are you going to throw Levine down?"
+
+Lydia's face whitened.  "Never!" she said.
+
+"What!  When you know he's a murderer?"
+
+"He never intended to kill your father.  Anyhow, I can't help what he's
+done.  He's like my own father and brother and mother all in one to me."
+
+The two young people sat looking into each other's eyes.  Suddenly
+Charlie threw Lydia's hand from him, and like Billy Norton, he strode
+down the path and out of the gate without a word.  Lydia was trembling
+violently but she picked up her sewing and forced herself to finish the
+rugs and spread them on the living-room floor.  They looked very well,
+she thought.  Later on, they showed a vicious tendency to turn up, to
+wrinkle and scuffle easily, threatening the life and limb of the heavy
+treading Lizzie and of Amos a dozen times a day.  But the evening after
+Charlie's visit she was too distrait to notice the complaints of her
+elders.
+
+Levine did not appear at the cottage for several days.  During that
+time Lydia tried to put Charlie's story out of her mind.  With
+housework and swimming and giggling with Margery, she managed to do
+this during the day, but at night she dreamed of it and woke, and spoke
+to Adam.
+
+When John did come out she avoided talking to him and he caught her
+several times looking at him with a sad and puzzled expression.  When
+they started on their usual Sunday walk, Amos went back to the house
+for his cane and Levine said, abruptly, "Out with it, young Lydia!"
+
+"I promised I wouldn't," she said.
+
+"Been hearing more stories about my wickedness?" asked John.
+
+Lydia nodded, miserably.
+
+"My dear," Levine said quietly, "this is a man's game.  I'm playing a
+rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can fight.  In it, the weak must fail
+and maybe die.  But out of it a great good will come to this community.
+As long as the Indians are here to exploit, this community will be
+demoralized.  I'm using every means fair or foul to carry my purpose.
+Can't you let it go at that?"
+
+Lydia set her teeth.  "Yes, I can and I will," she said, as her father
+came up with his cane.
+
+And though this was more easily said than done and the thought of
+murdered chiefs and starved babies troubled her occasionally, she did
+not really worry over it all as much as she might have were she not
+entering her senior year in the High School.
+
+If life holds any position more important, any business more soul
+satisfying than that of being a High School senior, few people are so
+fortunate as to have discerned it.  Being a college senior is a highly
+edifying and imposing business, but the far greater advantages lie with
+the High School senior.  He is four years younger.  He has lost no
+illusions.  He has developed no sense of values.  He is not conscious
+of the world outside his vision.  But in spite of a smug conviction of
+superiority, the college senior has heard life knocking at the door of
+his young illusions.  He has moments of wistful uncertainty.  No, it is
+the High School senior who is life's darling.
+
+Lydia was not altogether an easy person to live with this year although
+both Lizzie and Amos realized that never had she been so altogether
+sweet and lovable as now.  She objected to Lizzie's table manners.  She
+was hurt because Amos would eat in his shirt-sleeves, and would sit in
+his stocking feet at night, ignoring the slippers she crocheted him.
+She stored in the attic the several fine engravings in gilt frames that
+her father and mother had brought with them from New England.  In their
+place she hung passepartouted Gibson pictures clipped from magazines.
+And she gave up reading tales of travel and adventure, gave up Dickens
+and Thackeray and Mark Twain and took to E. P. Roe and other writers of
+a sticky and lovelorn nature.
+
+In spite of the camping trip, Lydia saw little of her campmates.
+Charlie did not reenter school in the fall.  Olga and Gustus were
+devoted to each other and, to Lydia's surprise, Kent took Margery to
+several parties.
+
+"I thought you liked Gustus best," she said to Margery one Saturday
+afternoon late in the fall.  Lydia was calling on Margery and the two
+were making fudge.
+
+"Oh, that was last year!  Gustus is too sickly for me.  I'm crazy about
+Kent.  He's so big and strong and bossy!"
+
+A little pang shot through Lydia's heart.  But she was saved a reply by
+Elviry, who as usual was within earshot.
+
+"Kent Moulton doesn't amount to anything.  His father's got nothing but
+a salary.  Gustus'll have the brewery."
+
+"Well, who wants to marry a brewery," sniffed Margery.  "If you think
+I'm going to have any old bossy, beery German like Gustus'll be, you're
+mistaken.  Kent comes of fine Puritan stock."
+
+"Your ancestors don't pay the bills," said Elviry, sharply.  "If your
+father has that extra money he's expecting at Christmas time, you'll
+just go East to boarding-school, Margery."
+
+"I don't want to go," protested Margery.  "I love High School."
+
+"Makes no difference.  You have common tastes, just like your father.
+I want you should have refined tastes in your friends particularly."
+
+And Dave must have received his extra money, for after the Christmas
+holidays, Margery tearfully departed for the Eastern finishing school.
+The night after her departure, Kent made his first call on Lydia in
+many months.  The two withdrew to the kitchen to make candy and there
+Lydia's surprise and pleasure gave way to suspicion.  Kent seemed to
+want to talk for the most part about Margery!
+
+"Hasn't she grown to be a beauty," he said, beating the fudge briskly.
+
+"She always was beautiful," replied Lydia, who was cracking walnuts.
+"Didn't we use to hate her though!  Well, she was the whiniest little
+snip!"
+
+"Oh, that was her mother's fault!  The only good thing about this
+boarding-school deal is that it gets her away from Elviry Marshall.
+Put more nuts in here, Lyd.  You like her now, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, I do," replied Lydia, honestly, "though she's an awful silly.
+She never reads anything, and she flunked all her Thanksgiving
+examinations."
+
+"Anybody as pretty as Margery doesn't need to be brilliant," said Kent.
+
+"And she spoons, and you don't think much of girls that spoon."
+Lydia's cheeks were a deeper pink than usual.
+
+"Shucks, don't be catty, Lydia!" growled Kent.
+
+Lydia suddenly chuckled, though tears were very near the surface.
+"Well, when I'm an old maid here in the cottage, you and Margery can
+come out and call in your automobile."
+
+"Who's talking about marrying or you being an old maid?" asked Kent,
+disgustedly.  "Gee, you girls make me sick!"
+
+Lydia's jaw dropped.  Then she gave a laugh that ended abruptly.
+"Heavens, how clothes do count in life," she sighed.  "Come on in and
+give Dad and Lizzie some fudge, Kent."
+
+Kent called several times during the winter, but he never asked Lydia
+to go to a party nor did any of the other boy friends she saw daily in
+school--boys with whom she chummed over lessons, who told her their
+secrets, who treated her as a mental equal, yet never asked to call, or
+slipped boxes of candy into her desk or asked her into a drugstore for
+a sundae or a hot chocolate.
+
+Nobody resented this state of affairs more than old Lizzie.  After
+Kent's third or fourth call, she said to Lydia, closing the door behind
+him, "Yes, Kent'll come out here and see you, but I notice he don't
+take you anywhere.  If you had fine party clothes and lived on Lake
+Shore Avenue, he'd be bowing and scraping fast enough."
+
+Lydia tossed her head.  "I don't care about going to parties."
+
+"You do, too," insisted the old lady.  "You're eating your heart out.
+I know.  I was young once."
+
+Amos looked up from his paper.  "Lydia's too young to go if they did
+ask her.  But why don't they ask?"
+
+"It's because I'm too poor and I live so far out and I don't spoon,"
+answered Lydia.  "I don't care, I tell you."  And just to prove that
+she didn't care, Lydia bowed her face in her hands and began to cry.
+
+A look of real pain crossed Amos' face.  He got up hastily and went to
+Lydia's side.
+
+"Why, my little girl, I thought you were perfectly happy this year.
+And your clothes look nice to me."  He smoothed Lydia's bright hair
+with his work-scarred hand.  "I tell you, I'll borrow some money, by
+heck, and get you some clothes!"
+
+Lydia raised a startled face.  "No!  No!  I'd rather go in rags than
+borrow money.  We're almost out of debt now and we'll stay out.  Don't
+borrow, Daddy," her voice rising hysterically.  "Don't borrow!"  Adam
+began to howl.
+
+"All right, dearie, all right!" said Amos.
+
+"I'm an old fool to have said anything," groaned Lizzie.  "What does it
+matter when she's the best scholar in her class and everybody, teachers
+and boys and girls alike, loves her."
+
+Lydia wiped her eyes and hugged her father, then Adam and then Lizzie.
+
+"I've got John Levine, anyhow," she said.
+
+"You certainly have, hand and foot," said Amos.
+
+The matter was not mentioned again directly.  But the little scene
+rankled with Amos.  A week or so later he said at supper, "Lydia, I'm
+thinking seriously of moving."
+
+"Moving!  Where?  Why?" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"Well, I can borrow enough money, I find, to add to the rent we're
+paying, to rent the old stone house next to Miss Towne's.  My idea is
+to move there just till you finish college!  Then we'll go out on a
+farm.  But it'll give you your chance, Lydia."
+
+"Land!" murmured Lizzie.
+
+Lydia hesitated.  To move into the house next the Townes would be to
+arrive, to enter the inner circle, to cease to be a dowd.  But--she
+looked about the familiar rooms.
+
+"Daddy," she said, "would you really want to leave this cottage?"
+
+"I'd just as soon," replied Amos.  "Most places are alike to me since
+your mother's death.  I could stand doing without the garden, if I had
+the farm to look forward to."
+
+"How'd we pay the money back?" asked Lydia.
+
+"After the Levine bill passes," said Amos, "I'll have a section of
+pines."
+
+Instantly Lydia's sleeping land hunger woke and with it the memory of
+Charlie's tales.  She sat in deep thought.
+
+"Daddy," she said, finally, "we're not going to borrow, and we're not
+going to move again.  I don't see why people want to keep moving all
+the time.  I love this place, if it is only a cottage, and I'm going to
+stay here.  I wish we could buy it and hand it down in the family so's
+it would be known forever as the Dudley place.  Then nobody'd ever
+forget our name.  What's the use of trying to make a splurge with
+borrowed money?  We thought it was awful when the Barkers mortgaged
+their house to buy an automobile."
+
+"All right," said Amos, reluctantly.  "But remember, you've had your
+chance and don't feel abused about our poverty."
+
+"I won't," replied Lydia, obediently.
+
+And to her own surprise, she did feel less bitter about her meager,
+home-made clothing.  She had had a chance to improve it and had
+resisted the temptation.
+
+She told Ma Norton of Amos' plan, and her refusal.  Ma heard her
+through in silence.  They were sitting as usual in the kitchen of the
+Norton farmhouse.  Lydia ran over nearly every Saturday afternoon but
+she seldom saw Billy.  Amos had refused to allow Lydia to continue
+fudge selling and Ma supposed that that was why her son never spoke of
+Lydia or was about when she called.
+
+"You did exactly right, Lydia," was Ma's verdict.  "And you mustn't lay
+it all to clothes, though I've always maintained that party-going boys
+were just as silly about clothes as party-going girls.  You're old for
+your age, Lydia.  It takes older men to understand you.  I suppose your
+class has begun to talk about graduation.  It's March now."
+
+"Yes," said Lydia.  "We've chosen the class motto and the class color.
+I was chairman of the motto committee and we chose Ducit Amor
+Patriae--and purple and white's our color."
+
+"For the land's sake," murmured Ma.  "Why do you children always choose
+Latin or Greek mottoes?  Hardly anybody in the audience knows what they
+mean.  I never did get Billy's through my head."
+
+Lydia laughed.  "We just do it to be smart!  But I chose this one.
+It's one John Levine gave me years ago.  I thought it was a good one
+for young Americans--Love of Country leads them."
+
+"Indeed it is.  Especially with all the foreign children in the class.
+I'll have to tell Billy that.  He's doing fine in his law but his
+father's broken-hearted over his giving up farming."
+
+"I'll bet he goes back to it.  He's a born farmer," said Lydia.
+
+Late in March the valedictorian and salutatorian of the class were
+chosen.  The custom was for the teachers to select the ten names that
+had stood highest for scholarship during the entire four years and to
+submit these to the pupils of the class, who by popular vote elected
+from these the valedictorian and the salutatorian.
+
+To her joy and surprise Lydia's was one of the ten names.  So were
+Olga's and Kent's.
+
+"Olga and Kent will get it," Lydia told Amos and Lizzie.  "I'm going to
+vote for them myself.  All the boys are crazy about Olga and all the
+girls are crazy about Kent."
+
+The day on which the election took place was cold and rainy.  Amos
+plodding home for supper was astonished to see Lydia flying toward him
+through the mud a full quarter of a mile from home.
+
+"Daddy, they elected me valedictorian!  They did!  They did!"
+
+Amos dropped his dinner pail.  "You don't mean it!  How did it happen!
+I never thought of such a thing."  He was as excited as Lydia.
+
+She picked up his pail and clung to his arm as they started home.
+
+"I don't know how it happened.  They just all seemed to take it for
+granted.  No one was surprised but me.  Olga got four votes and Mamie
+Aldrich ten and I got sixty-six!  Daddy!  And Mamie wasn't cross but
+Olga was.  Oh, isn't it wonderful!"
+
+"Valedictorian!  My little Lydia!  Scholarship and popular vote!  I
+wish your mother was here.  What does Lizzie say?"
+
+Lydia giggled.  "I left Lizzie carrying on an imaginary conversation
+with Elviry Marshall, after she'd cried over me for half an hour.  And,
+Daddy, nobody was surprised but me!  Not the teachers or anybody!"
+
+"Thank God, there's some democracy left in the world," said Amos.
+"Evidently those youngsters voted without prejudice.  They can give us
+elders a few points.  Lord, Lydia! and folks have been looking down on
+us because we were poor and I'm little better than a day laborer.  I'll
+write to Levine tonight.  He'll have to be here for the exercises."
+
+"And Kent is salutatorian.  He won by just two votes.  I've got to
+begin to plan about my dress."
+
+"Now, I'm going to buy that dress, Lydia, if I have to borrow money.
+You aren't going to begin any talk about earning it."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Lydia, hastily.  "You won't have to borrow.
+White goods is always cheap and I'll get it right away so I can put
+lots of hard work on it."
+
+"What's your speech going to be about?" asked Amos, as they turned in
+the gate.
+
+"I haven't had time to think about that.  I'll plan it all out while
+I'm sewing.  I must make a V neck so I can wear the dress without the
+collar to the Senior Ball."
+
+Lizzie was waiting supper for them and poured the tea into the sugar
+bowl as she described to Amos the agonies of mind Elviry Marshall would
+endure on hearing the news.  Ma Norton came over during the evening to
+exchange a setting of eggs but wouldn't sit down after Amos had
+forestalled Lizzie in telling of Lydia's honor.  She said she couldn't
+wait to get home to tell Pa and Billy.
+
+Billy did not congratulate Lydia.  He passed her just as he had during
+all the months, with a curt little "Hello."  To tell the truth Lydia
+was heartily ashamed of herself for her shabby reception of Billy's
+plea.  Not that she had softened toward him!  But she knew she had been
+unkind and she missed the desultory companionship she had had with
+Billy.
+
+The preparation of the dress went on amazingly well.  The speech making
+was less simple.  As was customary, Lydia chose the class motto for her
+subject and sweated inordinately to find something to say.  She
+complained bitterly to Miss Towne and Amos because during the four
+years at High School nothing at all was taught about love of country,
+or patriotism, or anything that would make the motto suggestive.
+
+"How about your one term of Civil Government?" asked Miss Towne.
+
+"Oh, I was a freshman then and I've forgotten it all,--except the
+preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."
+
+Lydia stopped thoughtfully.
+
+Amos answered her plaint indignantly.  "Well, for heaven's sake!  And
+you a descendant of the Puritans!  Lord, what's become of the old
+stock!  No, I won't help you at all.  Think it out for yourself."
+
+And think it out Lydia did, sitting on the front steps with her sewing
+and listening to the sighing of the pine by the gate.
+
+Spring flew by like the wind, and June came.  There was but one flaw in
+Lydia's happiness.  Nobody asked her to attend the Senior Ball that was
+to take place on Graduation night.  To be sure, it was not an
+invitation affair.  The class was supposed to attend in a body but
+there was, nevertheless, the usual two-ing and only a very few of the
+girls who had no invitation from boys would go.  Lydia, herself, would
+have cut off her hand rather than appear at her own Senior Ball without
+a young man.
+
+She had pinned some faith to Kent, until she had heard that Margery was
+to be home in time for the graduating exercises.  As June came on and
+the tenth drew near, a little forlorn sense of the unfairness of things
+began to obscure Lydia's pride and joy in her honor.  On the ninth, the
+last rehearsal of the speech had been made; the dress was finished and
+hung resplendent in the closet; Amos himself had taken Lydia into town
+and bought her white slippers and stockings, taking care to inform the
+street-car conductor and the shoe clerk carelessly the wherefore and
+why of his mission.
+
+And Lydia knew that none of her classmates was going to ask her to the
+ball.  "They think they've done enough in giving me the valedictory,"
+she thought.  "As if I wouldn't exchange that in a minute for a sure
+enough invitation."
+
+Mortified and unhappy, she avoided her mates during the last week of
+school, fearing the inevitable question, "Who's going to take you, Lyd?"
+
+The tenth dawned, a lovely June day.  Amos had half a day off and was
+up at daylight, whistling in the garden.  The exercises began at ten
+and by half past eight, Lydia was buttoned into her pretty little
+organdy, Lizzie was puffing in her black alpaca and Amos was standing
+about in his black Sunday suit which dated back to his early married
+days.  By nine-thirty they had reached the Methodist church and Amos
+and Lizzie were established in the middle of the front row of the
+balcony while Lydia was shivering with fright in the choir-room where
+the class was gathered.
+
+Somebody began to play the organ and somebody else who looked like Miss
+Towne shoved Lydia toward the door and she led the long line of her
+mates into the front pews.  The same minister who had buried little
+Patience, prayed and a quartette sang.  A college professor spoke at
+length, then Kent appeared on the platform.
+
+Good old Kent, even if he wouldn't take Lydia to parties!  Kent, with
+his black eyes and hair, his ruddy skin and broad shoulders, was good
+to look on and was giving his speech easily and well.  Lydia had heard
+it a dozen times in rehearsal but now not a word Kent said was
+intelligible to her.  She was seeing him in a red bathing suit as he
+hung Florence Dombey from a yard arm of the willow.  She was hearing
+him as he knelt in the snow with an arm about her shoulders, "I'm so
+doggone sorry for you, Lydia."  What a dear he had been!  Now it all
+was different.  They were grown up.  This day marked their growing up
+and Kent didn't want to take her to parties.
+
+Kent bowed and took his seat.  The quartette sang and somebody prodded
+Lydia smartly in the back.  She made her way up to the platform and
+began to speak automatically.
+
+It was a very young and girlish speech.  It was delivered with
+tremendous sincerity.  Yet it did not matter much what she said, for
+what counted was that Lydia's contralto voice was very young and rich,
+that her golden hair was like a nimbus about her head, that her lips
+were red and sweet, that her cheeks were vivid and that her eyes were
+very blue, very innocent and clear.
+
+Amos with tight clenched fists and Lizzie with her lips a thin seam of
+nervous compression, were swelled with vanity and torn with fear lest
+she forget her lines.
+
+But John Levine, who had dashed in late and stood unnoticed in the
+crowd under the gallery listened intently, while he yearned over
+Lydia's immature beauty like a mother.
+
+"And so," she ended, "when we say good-by, you all must remember that
+we go out into the world resolved to live up to our motto.  That we
+believe with our forefathers that governments derive their just powers
+from the consent of the governed.  That all men are endowed by their
+Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty
+and the pursuit of happiness.  And that because the New England people
+in the Middle West are far from the cradle of liberty where these ideas
+were born, living among foreigners it behooves the members of our class
+to carry our motto into their daily life.  Love of country leads us and
+so farewell!"
+
+It was a foolish, sentimental little speech with one or two real
+thoughts in it and John Levine smiled even while the tears filled his
+eyes.  He told himself that no one, least of all probably Lydia
+herself, realized the cynical application of the class motto to Lake
+City conditions.
+
+The diplomas were distributed.  The great morning was over.  After the
+congratulations and the handshaking, Lydia found herself with her
+father, Lizzie, Levine and Ma Norton on the way to the trolley.  Lydia
+walked between her father and John.
+
+"You'll come out to dinner, Mr. Levine," asked Lydia.
+
+"No, ma'am," replied the Congressman.  "I return to Washington on the
+12:30 train, which gives me just time to see you to the trolley."
+
+"Why, what's the matter?" asked Amos.
+
+"We vote on the Levine bill, the morning I get back to Washington.  I
+just ran out to see young Lydia graduate."
+
+Amos groaned, "John, you're a fool!"
+
+Levine laughed.  "Lydia, am I a fool?"  He looked down at the flushed
+face above the dainty organdy.
+
+"No," she answered, giving him a swift look.  "You're a goose and a
+lamb."
+
+"So!  You see you don't understand me, Amos," said John, triumphantly
+as he helped Lydia aboard the street-car.  "Good-by, young Lydia.  I'll
+be home in a week or so."
+
+And so the great event ended.  After dinner Amos rushed back to the
+factory, Lydia hung the graduation gown away in her closet and she and
+Adam spent the afternoon on the lake shore, where the delicate splendor
+and perfume of June endeavored in vain to prove to Lydia that the
+Senior Ball was of no consequence.
+
+She was silent at supper, while Amos and Lizzie went over the details
+of the morning again.  After the dishes were washed she sat on the
+steps in the dusk with Adam's head in her lap when a carriage rolled up
+to the gate.  A man came swiftly up the path.  As he entered the stream
+of lamplight from the door Lydia with a gasp recognized Billy Norton.
+Billy, wearing a dress suit and carrying a bouquet of flowers!
+
+"Good evening, Lydia," he said calmly.  "Will you go to the Senior Ball
+with me?"
+
+Lydia was too much overcome for speech.  She never before had seen a
+man in a dress suit!  It made of Billy a man of the world.  Where was
+the country boy she had snubbed?
+
+"Here are some flowers I hope you'll wear," Billy went on, formally.
+"Would you mind hurrying?  It's pretty late."
+
+"Oh, Billy!" breathed Lydia, at last.  "Aren't you an angel!"
+
+She jumped to her feet and rushed through the house into her room,
+leaving Billy to explain to her father and Lizzie.  In half an hour the
+two were seated in the carriage, an actual, party-going, city hack, and
+bumping gaily on the way to the Ball.
+
+In her gratitude and delight, Lydia would have apologized to Billy for
+her last summer's rudeness, but Billy gave her no opportunity.  He
+mentioned casually that he had been up on the reservation, for a week,
+returning only that afternoon so that he had missed her graduation
+exercises.  They chatted quite formally until they reached Odd Fellows'
+Hall, where the dancing had already begun.
+
+Lydia's first dancing party!  Lydia's first man escort and he wearing a
+dress suit and there were only two others in the Hall!  Who would
+attempt to describe the joy of that evening?  Who would have recognized
+Billy, the farmer, in the cool blond person who calmly appropriated
+Lydia's card, taking half the dances for himself and parceling out the
+rest grudgingly and discriminatingly.  Kent was allowed two dances.  He
+was the least bit apologetic but Lydia in a daze of bliss was
+nonchalant and more or less uninterested in Kent's surprise at seeing
+her at a dance.
+
+For three hours, Lydia spun through a golden haze of melody and rhythm.
+Into three hours she crammed all the joy, all the thrill, that she had
+dreamed of through her lonely girlhood.  At half after eleven she was
+waltzing with Billy.
+
+"We must leave now, Lydia," he said.  "I promised your father I'd have
+you home by midnight."
+
+"Oh, Billy!  Just one more two step and one more waltz," pleaded Lydia.
+
+"Nope," he said, smiling down into her wistful eyes.  "I want to get a
+stand-in with your Dad because I want to take you to more parties."
+
+"Oh, Billy!  Do you!" breathed Lydia.  "Well, I don't think there's any
+one in the world has nicer things happen to them than I do!  Oh, Billy,
+just this waltz!"
+
+It would have taken a harder heart than Billy's to resist this.  He
+slipped his arm about her and they swung out on the floor to the
+strains of The Blue Danube, than which no lovelier waltz has ever been
+written.
+
+They did not speak.  Billy, holding the slender, unformed figure gently
+against his breast, looked down at the golden head with an expression
+of utter tenderness in his eyes, of deep resolve on his lips.
+
+At the end, Lydia looked up with a wondering smile.  "I didn't know any
+one could be so perfectly happy, Billy.  I shall always remember that
+of you--you gave me my happiest moment."
+
+On the way home in the bumping hack, Billy seemed to relax.  "Well, did
+I give you a good time, Miss, or didn't I?  Could Kent or Gustus have
+done better?"
+
+"Oh, they!" cried Lydia indignantly.  "But, Billy, I didn't know you
+could dance."
+
+"I couldn't, but I've been taking lessons all winter.  I'm not going to
+give a girl a chance twice to call me down the way you did last summer.
+Of course, this is just a second-hand dress suit, but I think it looks
+all right, don't you?"
+
+"Billy," said Lydia, "last summer I was just a silly little girl.  Now,
+I'm grown up.  You were the _swellest_ person at the ball to-night.
+You just wait till I tell your mother about it."
+
+Billy went up the path with Lydia to the steps and held her hand a
+moment in silence after he said, "It's a wonderful night!"
+
+A wonderful night, indeed!  The moon hung low over the lake and the
+fragrance of late lilac and of linden blooms enveloped them.  Youth and
+June-moonlight and silence!  A wonderful night indeed!
+
+"You are very sweet, Lydia," whispered the young man.  He laid his
+cheek for a moment against her hand, then turned quickly away.
+
+Lydia watched the carriage drive off, stood for a moment trying to
+impress forever on her mind the look and odor of the night, then with a
+tremulous sigh, she went indoors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE INDIAN CELEBRATION
+
+
+"The oak, the maple, the birch, I love them all, but nothing is so dear
+to the pine as the pine."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia was tired the day after the party, tired and moody.  After she
+had told Lizzie and Ma Norton all about the evening, she spent the rest
+of the day lying on the lake shore, with a book but not reading.  Late
+in the afternoon she went into the house and took Florence Dombey from
+her accustomed seat in a corner of the living-room.
+
+For a long time she sat with Florence Dombey in her arms, looking from
+the hectic china face to the scintillating turquoise of the lake and
+listening to the hushed whispering of the pine.  Finally with Adam
+lumbering jealously after her, she climbed the narrow stairs into the
+attic.
+
+Back under the eaves stood a packing box into which Lydia never had
+looked.  It contained all of little Patience's belongings.  Holding
+Florence Dombey in one arm, she lifted the lid of the box, catching her
+breath a little as she glimpsed the cigar box furniture and a folded
+little white dress.  Very carefully she laid Florence Dombey beside the
+furniture, leaned over and kissed her china lips and closed down the
+lid of the box.  Then of a sudden she dropped to the floor with her
+head against the box and sobbed disconsolately.  Adam gave a howl and
+crowded into her lap and Lydia hugged him but wept on.
+
+The late afternoon sun sifted through the dusty attic window on her
+yellow head.  Somewhere near the window a robin began to trill his
+vesper song.  Over and over he sang it until at last Lydia heard and
+raised her head.  Suddenly she smiled.
+
+"There, Adam," she said, "now I'm really grown up and I feel better.
+Let's go meet Dad."
+
+It was three or four days later that news came that the Levine bill had
+passed.  It was a compromise bill as John had intimated it would be to
+the half breeds in the woods.  Only the mixed bloods could sell their
+lands.  Nevertheless there was great rejoicing in Lake City.  Plans
+were begun immediately for a Fourth of July celebration upon the
+reservation.  Kent to his lasting regret missed the celebration.
+Immediately after school closed he had gone into Levine's office and
+had been sent to inspect Levine's holdings in the northern part of the
+State.
+
+Levine returned the last week in June and took charge of the
+preparations.  Amos, who never had been on the reservation, planned to
+go and Levine rented an automobile and invited Lydia, Amos, Billy
+Norton and Lizzie to accompany him.
+
+It rained on the third of July, but the fourth dawned clear and hot.
+Lydia really saw the dawn for she and Lizzie had undertaken to provide
+the picnic lunch and supper for the party of five and they both were
+busy in the kitchen at sunrise.  At eight o'clock the automobile was at
+the door.
+
+John drove the car himself and ordered Lydia in beside him.  The rest
+packed into the tonneau with the baskets.  It seemed as if all Lake
+City were headed for the reservation, for Levine's automobile was one
+of a huge line of vehicles of every type moving north as rapidly as the
+muddy road and the character of the motive power would permit.  As they
+neared the reservation, about eleven, they began to overtake parties of
+young men who had walked the twenty miles.
+
+They passed the Last Chance, which was gaily hung with flags.  Its yard
+was packed with vehicles.  Its bar was running wide open.  They swung
+on up the black road into the reservation, around a long hill, through
+a short bit of wood to the edge of a great meadow where John halted the
+car.
+
+On all sides but one were pine woods.  The one side was bordered by a
+little lake, motionless under the July sun.  On the edge of the pines
+were set dozens of tents and birch-bark wick-i-ups.  In the center of
+the meadow was a huge flagpole from which drooped the Stars and
+Stripes.  Near by was a grandstand and a merry-go-round and everywhere
+were hawkers' booths.
+
+Already the meadow was liberally dotted with sight-seers of whom there
+seemed to be as many Indians as whites.  The mechanical piano in
+connection with the merry-go-round shrilled above the calls of vendors.
+Overhead in the brazen blue of the sky, buzzards sailed lazily watching.
+
+"Isn't it great!" cried Lydia.  "What do we do first?"
+
+"Well," said Levine, "I'm free until three o'clock, when the speeches
+begin.  There'll be all sorts of Indian games going until then."
+
+"You folks go on," said Lizzie.  "I'm going to sit right here.  I never
+was so comfortable in my life.  This may be my only chance to see the
+world from an automobile and I don't calculate to lose a minute.  I can
+see all I want from right here."
+
+The others laughed.  "I don't blame you, Liz," said Amos.  "I feel a
+good deal that way, myself.  What's the crowd round the flagpole, John?"
+
+"Let's go see," answered Levine.
+
+"How did you get the Indians to come, Mr. Levine?" asked Billy.
+
+"By offering 'em all the food they could eat.  The majority of them
+haven't any idea what it's all about.  But they're just like white
+folks.  They like a party.  Don't get crowded too close to any of them,
+Lydia.  They're a dirty lot, poor devils."
+
+The crowd about the flagpole proved to be watching an Indian gambling
+game.  In another spot, a pipe of peace ceremony was taking place.  The
+shooting galleries were crowded.  Along the lake shore a yelling
+audience watched birch canoe races.  The merry-go-round held as many
+squaws and papooses and stolid bucks as it did whites.
+
+The four returned to the automobile for lunch hot and muddy but well
+saturated with the subtle sense of expectation and excitement that was
+in the air.
+
+"This is just a celebration and nothing else, John, isn't it?" asked
+Amos as he bit into a sandwich.
+
+"That's all," replied Levine.  "We thought it was a good way to jolly
+the Indians.  At the same time it gave folks a reason for coming up
+here and seeing what we were fighting for and, last and not least, it
+was the Indian Agent's chance to come gracefully over on our side."
+
+"Did he?" asked Lydia.
+
+"He did.  He's done more of the actual work of getting the celebration
+going than I have."
+
+"I wonder why?" asked Billy, suddenly.
+
+"All there is left for him to do," said Levine.  "Lydia, before the
+speeches begin, go up in the pines and choose your tract.  I'll buy it
+for you."
+
+Lydia glanced at Billy.  He was thinner this summer than she had ever
+seen him.  He was looking at her with his deep set gray eyes a little
+more somber, she thought, than the occasion warranted.  Nevertheless
+she stirred uneasily.
+
+"I don't want any Indian lands," she said.  "I'd always see Charlie
+Jackson in them."
+
+"The whole thing's wrong," muttered Billy.
+
+Levine gave him a quick look, then smiled a little cynically.  "You'd
+better go along with Lydia and take a look at the pines," he suggested.
+"Amos, I've already got your tract picked out.  It's ten miles from
+here so you can't see it to-day.  Come over to the speakers' stand and
+help me get things arranged."
+
+"I'd like to look at the pines again, anyhow," said Lydia.  "Come
+along, Billy."
+
+Lydia was wearing the corduroy outing suit of the year before and was
+looking extremely well.  Billy, in an ordinary business suit, was not
+the man of the world of Graduation night, yet there was a new maturity
+in his eyes and the set of his jaw that Lydia liked without really
+observing it.  Old Lizzie watched the two as they climbed the slope to
+the woods.  Billy strode along with the slack, irregular gait of the
+farmer.  Lydia sprang over the ground with quick, easy step.
+
+"Billy's a man grown," Lizzie said to herself, "and he's a nice fellow,
+but he don't tug at my old heart strings like Kent does--drat Kent,
+anyhow!"  She settled herself as conspicuously as possible in the
+automobile.  "If Elviry Marshall would pass now, I'd be perfectly
+happy," she murmured.
+
+Billy and Lydia entered the woods in silence and followed a sun-flecked
+aisle until the sound of the celebration was muffled save for the
+shrill notes of the mechanical piano, which had but two tunes, "Under
+the Bamboo Tree" and the "Miserere."
+
+"I hate to think of it all divided into farms and the pines cut down,"
+said Lydia.
+
+Billy leaned against one of the great tree trunks and stared
+thoughtfully about him.
+
+"I'm all mixed up, Lydia," he said.  "It's all wrong.  I know the
+things Levine and the rest are doing to get this land are wrong, and
+yet I don't see how they can be stopped."
+
+"Well," Lydia fanned herself with her hat, thoughtfully, "for years
+people have been telling me awful things Mr. Levine's done to Indians
+and I worried and worried over it.  And finally, I decided to take Mr.
+Levine for the dear side he shows me and to stop thinking about the
+Indians."
+
+"You can stop thinking, perhaps," said the young man, "but you can't
+stop this situation up here from having an influence on your life.
+Everybody in Lake City must be directly or indirectly affected by the
+reservation.  Everybody, from the legislators to the grocery keepers,
+has been grafting on the Indians.  Your own father says the thing
+that's kept him going for years was the hope of Indian lands.  Margery
+Marshall's clothed with Indian money."
+
+"And how about the influence on you, Billy?" asked Lydia with a keen
+look into the young fellow's rugged face.
+
+"I'm in the process of hating myself," replied Billy, honestly.  "I
+came up here last month to see how bad off the Indians were.  And I saw
+the poor starving, diseased brutes and I cursed my white breed.  And
+yet, Lyd, I saw a tract of pine up in the middle of the reservation
+that I'd sell my soul to own!  It's on a rise of ground, with a lake on
+one edge, and the soil is marvelous, and it belongs to a full-blood."
+
+There was understanding in Lydia's eyes.  "Oh, the pines are
+wonderful," she exclaimed.  "If one could only keep them, forever!  And
+I suppose that's the way the Indians feel about them too!"
+
+"It's all wrong," muttered Billy.  "It's all wrong, and yet," more
+firmly, "the reservation is doomed and if we don't take some of it,
+Lydia, we'll not be helping the Indians--but just being foolish."
+
+Lydia nodded.  A hot breeze drifted through the woods and the pines
+sighed deeply.
+
+"To have it and hold it for your children's children," exclaimed Lydia,
+passionately.  "You and yours to live on it forever.  And yet, I'd see
+a dead Indian baby and starving squaws behind every tree, I know I
+would."
+
+"I tell you what I'm going to do," said Billy, doggedly.  "I'm going to
+get hold of that tract.  I'm not going to deceive myself that it's all
+anything but a rotten, thieving game we whites are playing, but I'm
+going to do it, anyhow."
+
+"I'd like to myself," Lydia still had the look of understanding, "but
+I'm afraid to!  I'd be haunted by Charlie Jackson's eyes."
+
+"I'm going to get that tract.  I'll pay for it, somehow, and I'll go on
+doing what I can to see that the Indians get what's left of a decent
+deal."
+
+Again the two listened to the wind in the pines, then Lydia said, "We
+must get back for the speeches."
+
+Billy started back, obediently.
+
+"We're grown up, aren't we, Billy?" sighed Lydia.  "We've got to decide
+what we're going to do and be, and I hate to think about it.  I hate
+important decisions.  Seems as though I'd been dogged by 'em all my
+life."
+
+"If I had my way," cried Billy, unexpectedly, "you never should quite
+grow up.  You'd always be the dear little yellow-haired girl that
+tramped her legs off to earn my miserable old school books.  And that's
+what you always will be to me--the oldest and youngest little girl!
+And whether you like me or not, I'll tell you you're not going to have
+any worries that I can help you ward off."
+
+They were emerging into the meadow and Lydia laughed up at him
+mischievously, "I've always thought I overpaid for those school books.
+They were fearfully used up.  Oh, the speeches have begun," and Billy
+was hard put to it to keep close to her as she rushed toward the
+speakers' stand.
+
+Levine had just finished his speech when Billy and Lydia got within
+hearing, and he introduced State Senator James Farwell as the chief
+speaker of the day.  Farwell had considerable history to cover in his
+speech.  He began with the Magna Charta and worked by elaborate stages
+through the French Revolution, the conquest of India, the death of
+Warren Hastings, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution and
+the Civil War to Lincoln's Gettysburg speech.
+
+His audience, standing in the burning sun, was restless.  The Indians,
+understanding little that was said, were motionless, but the whites
+drifted about, talked in undertones and applauded only when as a
+fitting peak to all the efforts of the ages toward freedom, Farwell
+placed the present freeing of the Indians from the reservation.
+
+"The great fool!" said Billy to Lydia, as Farwell finally began to bow
+himself off the platform.
+
+Levine rose and began, "Ladies and gentlemen, this ends our program.
+We thank--"
+
+He was interrupted here by applause from the Indians.  Looking round he
+saw Charlie Jackson leading forward old Chief Wolf.
+
+"Chief Wolf wants to say a few words," cried Charlie.
+
+"The program is closed," called Levine loudly.
+
+There was a threat in Charlie's voice.  "He is going to speak!"  And
+there was a threat in the Indian voices that answered from the
+audience, "Let speak!  Let speak."
+
+Levine conferred hastily with Farwell and the Indian Agent, then the
+three with manifest reluctance--stood back and Charlie led the old
+Indian to the foot of the platform.
+
+Old Wolf was half blind with trachoma.  He was emaciated with sickness
+and slow starvation.  Nevertheless, clad in the beaded buckskin and
+eagle feathers of his youth, with his hawk face held high, he was a
+heroic figure of a man.
+
+He held up his right hand and began to speak in a trembling old bass,
+Charlie's young tenor translating sentence by sentence.  With the first
+word, the audience became motionless and silent.
+
+"I come from the wick-i-ups of my fathers to say one last word to the
+whites.  I am an old, old man.  The last winter was bitter hard and I
+may never see another July sun.  I have lived too long.  I have seen my
+race change from young men strong and daring as eagles, as thrifty and
+fat as brown bears, to feeble yellow wolves fit only to lap the carrion
+thrown them by the whites, and to lie in the sun and die.
+
+"And I say to you whites, you have done this.  You have moved us on and
+on, promising always that each resting place shall be ours forever.
+You swore by your God, in solemn council, that we could keep this
+reservation forever.  With room for all the peoples of the world here,
+you could not find room for the Indian.  You are a race of liars.  You
+are a race of thieves.  You have debauched our young men with your
+women.  You have ruined our daughters with your men.  You have taken
+our money.  And now you are entering our last home with the hand of
+desolation.  When the enemy enters the abiding place, the dweller is
+doomed.  But I place the curse of the Indian Spirit on you and the land
+you are stealing.  Some day it will be done to you as you have done to
+us.  Some day--"
+
+Levine stepped forward.  "Jackson, take that Indian away," he commanded.
+
+An angry murmur came from the Indians in the audience.  A murmur that
+as Levine laid hold of old Wolf's arm, grew to strange calls.  There
+was a surging movement toward the platform.  Billy jumped on a box that
+he had found for a seat for Lydia.
+
+"Charlie!" he roared, "Charlie!  Remember there are women and children
+in this crowd."
+
+"What do I care for your women and children?" shouted Charlie.
+
+Then his glance fell on Lydia's golden head.  She waved her hand to him
+beseechingly.  Charlie hesitated for a moment, then spoke loudly in
+Indian to the crowd, and led old Wolf from the platform.  The movement
+forward of the Indians ceased.  The whites moved out of the crowd and
+for a moment there was a complete segregation of Indians and whites.
+
+Then the mechanical piano which had stopped during the speech-making
+suddenly started up with a loud twang of "Under the Bamboo Tree."  Two
+Indian boys laughed and started on a run for the merry-go-round and the
+crowd followed after.
+
+Billy got down from his box with a sigh of relief.  "That might have
+been an ugly moment," he said, "if Charlie hadn't seen you."
+
+"The poor things!  Oh, Billy, the poor, poor things!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Billy nodded.  "It's all wrong."
+
+The noise of hawkers began again, but something had gone out of the
+celebration.  The Indians stood about in groups, talking, Charlie and
+Chief Wolf the center always of the largest group.
+
+Amos and John joined Billy and Lydia at the machine.  "The war dancing
+begins at sundown," said Levine.  "I told the Indian Agent 'twas a risk
+to let them go on, after this episode.  But he laughs at me.  I don't
+like the look of things, though."
+
+"They aren't armed?" asked Amos.
+
+"No, but've got those pesky bows and arrows we were having them show
+off with.  I don't know but what I'd better get you folks home."
+
+"Shucks," said Amos, "I wouldn't let the Indians think they could scare
+us.  What could they do, poor sickly devils, anyhow?"
+
+"That's right," said Billy.  "There's nothing can happen.  I don't
+think Charlie Jackson would stand for any violence."
+
+"I don't know about that," Levine spoke thoughtfully.  "He's left Doc
+Fulton and is living on the reservation again.  They always revert."
+
+"Listen!  Listen!" cried Lydia,
+
+There was a red glow behind the clouds low in the west.  From the foot
+of the flagpole came a peculiar beat of drum.  A white can beat a drum
+to carry one through a Gettysburg.  An Indian can beat a drum to carry
+one's soul back to the sacrifice of blood upon a stony altar.  This
+drum beat "magicked" Lydia and Billy.  It was more than a tocsin, more
+than a dance rhythm, more than the spring call.  They hurried to the
+roped-off circle round the flagpole, followed by John and Amos.
+
+An Indian in beaded buckskin squatted by the pole, beating a drum.
+Above him the flag stirred lazily.  The west was crimson.  The scent of
+sweet grass was heavy.  There was a breathless interval while the drum
+seemed to urge Lydia's soul from her body.
+
+Then there came the cry again followed by a wordless chant.  Into the
+ring, in all the multicolored glory of beads and paint, swung a dozen
+moccasined braves.  They moved in a step impossible to describe,--a
+step grave, rhythmic, lilting, now slow, three beats to a step, now
+swift, three steps to a beat.  Old chiefs, half blind with trachoma,
+scarred with scrofula and decrepit with starvation; young bucks, fresh
+and still strong, danced side by side, turned by the alchemy of the
+drum into like things, young and vivid as dawn.
+
+At intervals, at the bidding of the braves, squaws arose and moved
+sedately into the circle.  In their dark dresses they moved about the
+outer edge of the circle with a side step that scarcely ruffled their
+skirts.  The west lost its glow.  Fires flashed here and there in the
+meadow.  In the flickering, changing lights the dance went on and on.
+The flag fitfully revealed itself above the melting, gliding,
+opalescent group about the pole, that by degrees was growing larger as
+was the constant rim of somber squaws, with their dumb faces
+Sphinx-like in the half light.
+
+Lydia shivered with excitement.  Billy pulled her arm through his.
+
+"I don't like this," he muttered.
+
+"What's the matter?" exclaimed Lydia.  "Do you think there's going to
+be trouble?"
+
+"I don't know.  It's just something in the air.  I think we'd better
+find the folks and get you and Lizzie out of this."
+
+"I don't believe they mean any harm," said Lydia.  "Lots of the whites
+started home before sunset, anyhow."
+
+"I wish you had," replied Billy.  "Gee, here it comes."
+
+The chant suddenly changed to a yell.  The drum beat quickened, and the
+great circle of dancing Indians broke and charged the crowd of whites.
+A number of them drew revolvers and began firing them into the air.
+Others drew taut the great bows they carried.  The whites plunged
+backward precipitately.
+
+Billy thrust Lydia behind him.  "Don't move, Lyd," he cried, pushing
+aside a threatening buck as he did so.
+
+"Kill 'em whites!" shrieked the squaws.
+
+"Run 'em whites off our reservation!" shouted half a dozen young bucks.
+
+Lydia was trembling but cool.  "Good for them!  Oh, Billy, good for
+them!" she exclaimed.
+
+He did not reply.  His great body circled about her, with shoulder and
+elbow buffeting off the surging crowd.  Thus far the whites had taken
+the proceedings as a joke.  Then a white woman screamed,--
+
+"Run!  It's a massacre!"
+
+"Massacre" is a horrifying word to use to whites in an Indian country.
+Men and women both took up the cry,--
+
+"It's a massacre!  Run!"
+
+And the great crowd bolted.
+
+Like pursuing wolves, the Indians followed, beating the laggards with
+their bows, shouting exultantly.  Billy caught Lydia round the waist
+and held her in front of him as well as he could, and for a few moments
+the rush of the mob carried them on.
+
+Then Lydia heard Billy's voice in her ear.  "If this isn't stopped, it
+_will_ be a massacre.  We've got to find Charles Jackson."
+
+"We may be killed trying to find him!" Lydia cried.
+
+"We've got to make a try for it, anyhow," replied Billy.  "Brace your
+shoulders back against my chest.  I'll try to stop."
+
+They succeeded in holding themselves steadily for a moment against the
+mob and in that moment, Billy caught a screaming squaw by the arm.
+
+"Susie, where's Charlie Jackson?"
+
+She jerked her thumb back toward the flag pole and twisted away.
+
+"All right!  Now we'll make for the pole, Lydia, get behind me and put
+your arms round my waist.  Hang on, for heaven's sake."
+
+Lydia did hang on for a few moments.  But the flight was now developing
+into a free for all fight.  And before she knew just how it happened,
+Lydia had fallen and feet surged over her.
+
+She buried her face in her arms.  It seemed an age to her before Billy
+had snatched her to her feet.  In reality she was not down for more
+than two minutes.  Billy swung her against his chest with one arm and
+swung out with his other, shouting at Indians and whites alike.
+
+"You damned beasts!  You dirty damned beasts."
+
+Lydia, bruised and shaken, clung to him breathlessly, then cried, "Go
+ahead, Billy!"
+
+He glanced down at her and saw a streak of blood on her forehead.  His
+face worked and he began to sob and curse like a madman.
+
+"They've hurt you, the hellhounds!  I'll kill somebody for this."
+
+Kicking, striking with his free arm, oaths rolling from his lips, he
+burst through the crowd and rushed Lydia to the free space about the
+flagpole where Charlie Jackson stood coolly watching the proceedings.
+
+Billy shook his fist under the Indian's nose.
+
+"Get down there and call the pack off or I'll brain you."
+
+Jackson shrugged his shoulders, calmly.  "Let 'em have their fun.  It's
+their last blowout.  I hope they do kill Levine and Marshall."
+
+Lydia pulled herself free of Billy.  Her voice was trembling, but she
+had not lost her head.
+
+"Call them off, Charlie.  It'll just mean trouble in the end for all of
+you if you don't."
+
+Charlie looked at Lydia closely and his voice changed as he said, "You
+got hurt, Lydia?  I'm sorry."
+
+"Sorry!  You damned brute!" raved Billy.  "I tell you, call off this
+row!"
+
+The two young men glared at each other.  Afterglow and firelight
+revealed a ferocity in Billy's face and a cool hatred in Charlie's that
+made Lydia gasp.  The shouting of the mob, the beating of the drum was
+receding toward the road.  The flag snapped in the night wind.
+
+Billy put his face closer to Charlie's.  The muscles of his jaw knotted
+and his hands clenched and unclenched.
+
+"Call it off!" he growled.
+
+Charlie returned Billy's stare for a long moment.  Then sullenly,
+slowly, he turned and threw out across the night a long, shrill cry.
+He gave it again and again.  At each repetition the noise of the mob
+grew less, and shortly panting, feverish-eyed bucks began to struggle
+into the light around the pole.
+
+Then, without a word, Billy led Lydia away.  The Indians passing them
+shook their bows at them but they were unmolested.
+
+"Can you walk, Lydia?  Do you think you're badly hurt?" asked Billy.
+
+"I'm not hurt except for this cut on my head.  And I guess I'm scared
+and bruised from being stepped on.  That's all."
+
+"All!  To think of me not scratched and you hurt!  Your father ought to
+horsewhip me!"
+
+"You saved me from being trampled to death!" cried Lydia, indignantly.
+"Oh there's the auto."
+
+There it was, indeed, with old Lizzie standing in the tonneau, wringing
+her hands, and Amos and Levine, dust covered and disheveled, guarding
+the car with clubs.
+
+They all shouted with relief when they saw the two.  Lydia by now had
+wiped the blood from her face.
+
+"Billy," cried Levine, "could you run the car and the two women down
+the road while Amos and I help the Agent get order here?  The worst
+seems to be over, for some reason."
+
+"Billy got Charlie Jackson to call the Indians in," said Lydia.
+
+"Good work!" exclaimed Amos.  "Are you both all right?"
+
+"Yes," answered Lydia.  "Go on!  Billy'll take care of us."
+
+"I'll wait for you at the willows, a mile below Last Chance," said
+Billy.
+
+"Land," said Lizzie, as the car swung through the hurrying whites, to
+the road.  "About one picnic a lifetime like this, would do me!"
+
+Billy was an indifferent chauffeur but he reached the willows without
+mishap.
+
+"Now," he said, "come out in front of the lamps, Lydia, till I see what
+happened to you."
+
+"For heaven's sake, did Lydia get hurt?" screamed Lizzie.
+
+"Don't fuss about me," said Lydia crossly, not offering to follow the
+other two out of the car.
+
+Billy turned, lifted her down bodily and led her around to the lamps,
+while he told Lizzie what had happened.
+
+The cut on the scalp was slight.  Billy washed it out with water from
+the brook back of the willows and Lizzie produced a clean pocket
+handkerchief with which to bind it.  Then they went back to the car and
+ate their belated supper.  After a time, Lizzie, who had the back seat
+to herself, began to snore comfortably.
+
+Little by little, the stars were blotted out by a thin film of clouds.
+Sitting under the willows with the murmur of the brook and the
+fragrance of marsh grass enveloping them, the two young people did not
+talk much.
+
+"Billy, were you scared?" asked Lydia.
+
+"I don't know.  I only know I went crazy when I saw you were hurt.
+God, Lydia--I couldn't stand that!"
+
+"Billy," whispered Lydia, "you're so good to me and I was so horrid to
+you once."
+
+Billy felt her fingers on his knee and instantly the thin little hand
+was enveloped in his warm fist.  "Do you take it all back, Lydia?"
+
+"Well, the horrid part of it, I do," she hedged.
+
+"That's all right," returned the young man.  "I'm willing to fight for
+the rest of it.  Don't try to pull your hand away, because I intend to
+hold it till the folks come.  You can't help yourself, so you have no
+responsibility in the matter."
+
+So for an hour longer they sat, watching the summer night and waiting.
+And sometimes it seemed to Lydia that they were a pioneer man and woman
+sitting in their prairie schooner watching for the Indians.  And
+sometimes it seemed to her that they were the last white man and woman,
+that civilization had died and the hordes were coming down upon them.
+
+Finally two dim figures approached.  "All right, Lydia?" asked Amos.
+
+"Oh, yes!  Yes!" she cried.  "Are either of you hurt?"
+
+"No," replied Levine, "but we stayed till I'd got my half-breeds
+distributed about to watch that none of the full bloods got out of the
+meadow."
+
+"Was any one hurt?" asked Billy.
+
+"Oh, two or three broken heads among both Indians and whites.  We got
+hold of Charlie Jackson about eleven and locked him up, then we felt
+secure."
+
+"You aren't going to hurt Charlie!" cried Lydia.
+
+"No, but we'll shut him up for a week or so," said Amos.  "Move over,
+Lizzie."
+
+"Goodness," exclaimed Lizzie, "I must have dozed off for a minute!"
+
+In the laughter that followed, Levine started the car homeward.
+
+During the trip, the story was told of Lydia's mishap, Billy and Lydia
+interpolating each other in the telling.  Amos shook hands with Billy
+silently when they had finished and Levine turned round from the wheel
+to say,
+
+"I'll not forget this night's work, Bill."
+
+They reached home at daylight.  The Celebration made table talk and
+newspaper space for several days.  No real attempt was made to punish
+the Indians.  For once, the whites, moved by a sense of tardy and
+inadequate justice, withheld their hands.
+
+Kent never ceased to mourn that he had missed the affair.  He confided
+the fact to Lydia one Sunday that he had told Levine of their
+eavesdropping on him in the woods.
+
+"What did he say?" asked Lydia, flushing.
+
+"Gave me this nice fat job," replied Kent.
+
+Lydia stared, then she sighed.  "Well, I don't understand men at all!"
+
+And Kent laughed.
+
+Lydia saw a good deal of Billy during the summer.  He never spoke of
+the accident to her at the Celebration, except to inquire about her
+bruises which troubled her for a week or so.  Lydia wondered if he was
+ashamed of his wild flame of anger and his tears.  She herself never
+thought of the episode without a thrill, as if she had been close for
+once to the primal impulses of life.
+
+Margery Marshall and Elviry went to Atlantic City and Newport this
+summer.  John Levine was sure to take supper at the cottage once or
+twice a week, but he was very busy with his political work and with the
+enormous sales of mixed-breed lands to the whites.
+
+It was just before college opened that Amos announced that he was going
+to buy the one hundred and twenty acres John had set aside for him.
+
+"How are you going to pay for it?" Lydia asked.
+
+"Don't you worry, I'll tend to that," replied Amos.
+
+Levine was taking supper with them.  "Better tell her all about it,
+Amos," he said.  "You know Lydia is our partner."
+
+"Well, she'll just worry," warned Amos.  "John's going to hold it for
+me, till I can get the pine cut off.  That'll pay for the land."
+
+"How much did you pay for it, Mr. Levine?" asked Lydia.
+
+Levine grinned.  "I forget!"
+
+Lydia's gaze was still the round, pellucid gaze of her childhood.  She
+sat now with her chin cupped in her palm, her blue eyes on Levine.  To
+the surprise of both the men, however, she said nothing.
+
+After the supper dishes were washed, and Amos was attending to the
+chickens, Lydia came slowly out to the front steps where Levine was
+sitting.  He reached up and catching her hand pulled her down beside
+him on the topmost step.  She leaned her head against his arm and they
+sat in silence, Lydia with her eyes on the dim outline of the pine by
+the gate.
+
+"Lydia," said John, finally, "how does the Great Search go on?  We
+haven't reported for a long time."
+
+"I don't think I make much headway," replied Lydia.  "The older I grow,
+the less I understand men and I've always felt as if, if there was a
+God, He was a man."
+
+"You mean male, rather than female," agreed John.
+
+"Lydia, dear, I wish you did have faith."
+
+"But do you believe, yourself?" urged Lydia.
+
+"Yes, I know that the soul can't die," said the man, quietly.  "And the
+thing that makes me surest is the feeling I have for you, I know that
+I'll have another chance."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Lydia wonderingly.
+
+"_That_, you'll never know," he replied.
+
+"Well, I know that you're a dear," said the young girl, unexpectedly,
+"no matter how you get your Indian lands.  And I love you to death."
+
+She patted his cheek caressingly, and John Levine smiled sadly to
+himself in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE HARVARD INSTRUCTOR
+
+
+"The saddest things that I have seen are the burned pine woods and the
+diseased Indians."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+The University campus was a huge square of green, elm dotted, that was
+bordered on one edge for a quarter of a mile by the lake.  The other
+three sides were enclosed by the college buildings, great Gothic piles
+of gray stone, ivy grown, with swallow haunted eaves.  One entered the
+campus through wide archways, that framed from the street ravishing
+views of lake and elm, with leisurely figures of seniors in cap and
+gown in the foreground.
+
+College life was not much unlike High School life for Lydia.  She of
+course missed the dormitory living which is what makes University
+existence unique.  The cottage was nearly three miles from the campus.
+Lydia took a street-car every morning, leaving the house with her
+father.  She was very timid at first: suffered agony when called on to
+recite: reached all her classes as early as possible and sat in a far
+corner to escape notice.  But gradually, among the six thousand
+students she began to lose her self-consciousness and to feel that,
+after all, she was only attending a larger High School.
+
+It was curious, it seemed to her, in how short a time the real High
+School dropped out of her life.  Miss Towne and the cooking teacher who
+had had so much to do with her adolescent development, became more or
+less dreamlike.  And though Lydia did try to call on Miss Towne at the
+High School, her days were very full and little by little she slipped
+away entirely from the old environment.
+
+Except for flying visits home, John Levine spent the year at
+Washington.  He was returned to Congress practically automatically, at
+the end of his term.  Kent throve mightily as a real estate man.  He
+dashed about in a little "one lung" car with all the importance of
+nineteen in business for the first time.  He continued to call on Lydia
+at irregular intervals in order to boast, she thought, of his real
+estate acumen and of his correspondence with Margery and Olga, both of
+whom were now at boarding-school.
+
+Lydia was taking a general course in college.  In a vague way, she was
+planning to become a teacher and partly because she had no aptitude for
+foreign languages, and partly because of the deep impression Miss
+Towne's little lecture on slang had made on her, she decided to teach
+English.  She therefore took not only the required course in Freshman
+Composition, but an elective in Shakespeare, and was herded with fifty
+others into the classroom of a young instructor fresh from Harvard.  He
+was a frail looking young man, smooth shaven and thin, with large,
+light brown eyes behind gold rimmed eyeglasses.
+
+Lydia was deeply impressed from the very first by the young man's
+culture.  He could quote Latin and Greek quite as freely as he could
+French and German and his ease in quoting the latter seemed as great as
+in quoting Palgrave's Lyrics, which Lydia was sure he could quote from
+cover to cover.
+
+If his manner was a trifle impatient and condescending, this only
+served to enhance his impressiveness.  And he knew his Shakespeare.
+Lydia entered under his guidance that ever new and ever old world of
+beauty that only the born Shakespeare lover discovers.
+
+The Christmas recess had come and gone before Lydia became vaguely
+conscious that young Professor Willis called on her always to recite,
+whether he did on any other girl in the class or not.  She did not know
+that from the first day she had entered his class the young professor
+had been conscious of the yellow head in the furthest corner of the
+classroom.  It was a nobly shaped head bound round with curly yellow
+braids above a slender face, red cheeked yet delicate.  He was
+conscious too of the home-made suit and the cheap shirtwaists, with the
+pathetic attempt at variety through different colored neckties.  Little
+by little he recognized that the bashful young person had a mental
+background not shared by her mates, and he wondered about her.
+
+It was early in January that he made an attempt to satisfy his
+curiosity.  The snowfall had been light so far and heavy winds had
+blown the lake clear of drifts.  Lydia often brought her skates to
+class with her and if the wind were favorable skated home after her
+last recitation.
+
+She had just fastened on her skates one day when a rather breathless
+voice behind her said,
+
+"Going for a skate, Miss Dudley?" and Professor Willis, skates over his
+shoulder, bore down on her.
+
+Lydia blushed vividly--"I--I often skate home.  I live three miles down
+the shore."
+
+"Rather thought I'd have a try myself, if you don't mind."
+
+"Heavens!" thought Lydia.  "I hope he won't come clear home with me?
+The house looks awful!"
+
+Willis fastened on his skates and stood up.  "Which way?" he asked.
+
+Lydia nodded homeward and started off silently, the Harvard man close
+beside her.
+
+"You enjoy your Shakespeare work, Miss Dudley?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes!" cried Lydia.  "That most of anything.  Don't you love to
+teach it?"
+
+"Er--in some ways!  I will admit that the co-educational end of it is
+very trying to an Eastern college man."
+
+This was such a surprising view to Lydia that she forgot to be bashful.
+"Don't you like girls, Professor Willis?" she asked.
+
+"Not in a boys' classroom--that is--at first the situation brought cold
+sweat to my face.  But now, I carry on the work to a great extent for
+you.  You are the only person with a background, don't you know."
+
+Lydia didn't know.  The Harvard man's voice, however, was entirely
+impersonal, so she ventured to explore.
+
+"What do you mean by background?"
+
+"If you wouldn't skate so outrageously fast," he panted, "I could tell
+you with more--more aplomb."
+
+"But," explained Lydia, "I have to skate fast.  There's always so much
+to be done and old Lizzie isn't well."
+
+She looked at the Shakespeare professor innocently.  He looked at his
+watch.
+
+"Dear me!" he said, "I must be back in the classroom in half an hour.
+Supposing we continue this conversation to-morrow, in your own home,
+Miss Dudley?  May I call to-morrow night?"
+
+"Why yes," replied Lydia, in utter embarrassment again, "if you really
+want to!  It's a dreadful trip,--to the end of the car line and half a
+mile along the road to a white cottage after that."
+
+"That's nothing," said the Harvard man, gravely.  "Till to-morrow night
+then," and lifting his cap, he skated back, leaving Lydia in a state of
+mind difficult to define.
+
+She told Lizzie and her father that evening.  Amos looked over his
+paper with a slight scowl.  "You're too young to have a college
+professor calling."
+
+"Well," cried Lydia, "you don't seem to realize how wonderful it is
+that he wants to take this awful trip out here, just to see _me_.  And
+don't let it worry you, Daddy!  He'll never want to come but once."
+She looked around the living-room disgustedly.
+
+Amos started to speak, looked at Lizzie, who shook her head, and
+subsided.  The older Lydia grew, the more helpless he felt in guiding
+her.  It seemed to him though that Patience would be pleased to have a
+professor calling on her daughter, and he let the matter go at that.
+
+The next day was Saturday, and Lydia started an attack on the
+living-room immediately after breakfast.  She re-oiled the floors.  She
+took down the curtains, washed and ironed them and put them up again.
+She blacked the base burner and gave the howling Adam a bath.  The old
+mahogany worried her, even after she had polished it and re-arranged it
+until the worst of the scratches were obscured.
+
+Her father's old wooden armchair, a solid mahogany that had belonged to
+his great-grandfather, she decided to varnish.  She gave it two heavy
+coats and set it close to the kitchen stove to dry.  By this time she
+was tired out.  She lay in the dusk on the old couch watching the red
+eyes of the base burner, when Billy came in.
+
+"Just stopped on my way home to see if you'd go skating to-night," he
+said.  "Tired out?  What've you been doing?"
+
+Lydia enumerated the day's activities ending with, "Professor Willis is
+coming to call this evening."
+
+Billy gave a low whistle.  "Of course, I knew they'd begin to take
+notice sooner or later.  But I don't see why you wanted to wear
+yourself out for a sissy like him."
+
+"He's not a sissy.  He's a gentleman," said Lydia, calmly.  She was
+still curled up on the couch and Billy could just distinguish her
+bright hair in the red glow from the stove.
+
+Billy was silent for a moment, then he said, "It's a shame you have to
+work so hard.  I think of you so often when I see other girls in their
+pretty clothes, gadding about!  Doggone it! and you're worth any ten of
+them.  If I had my way--"
+
+He paused and for a moment only the familiar booming of the ice
+disturbed the silence.
+
+"I don't mind the work so much as I do going without the pretty
+clothes," said Lydia.  "I suppose you'll think I'm awful silly," she
+suddenly sat up in her earnestness, "but when I get to thinking about
+how I'm growing up and that dresses never can mean to me when I'm old
+what they do now--oh, I can't explain to a man!  It's like Omar
+Khayyam--
+
+  "'Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the rose
+  That youth's sweet scented manuscript should close--'
+
+and my youth's going to close without the sweet scent of the rose."
+
+Billy made one great stride over to the couch and sitting down beside
+Lydia he took her thin, work hardened little hands in his.  "Lydia, no!
+You don't see yourself right!  All the dresses in the world couldn't
+make you sweeter or more fragrant to a fellow's heart than you are now.
+The only importance to the clothes is that you love them so.  Don't you
+see?"
+
+Lydia laughed uncertainly.  "I see that you're a dear old blarney,
+Billy.  And I know one thing I have got that not one girl in a thousand
+has and that is the friendship of some of the best men in the world.
+In lots of ways, I'm very lucky.  Honestly, I am!  Trot on home, Billy.
+I've got to get supper.  And I don't have to work so hard, remember
+that.  Half my work is in trying to fix up the house."
+
+Billy rose reluctantly.  "I'm leaving you some marshmallows," he said.
+"I hope if you offer Willis one, it'll choke him, or," as he opened the
+door, "maybe he'll break his leg or his neck on the way out," and he
+shut the door firmly behind him.
+
+Amos submitted with some grumbling to being relegated to the
+dining-room with Lizzie for the evening.  He complained somewhat
+bitterly, however, over the condition of his armchair which had refused
+to dry and was in a state of stickiness that defied description.
+
+Old Lizzie, who was almost as flushed and bright-eyed over the expected
+caller as Lydia, finally squelched Amos with the remark, "For the
+land's sake, Amos, you talk like an old man instead of a man still
+forty who ought to remember his own courting days!"
+
+Willis arrived, shortly after eight.  If the trip had been somewhat
+strenuous, he did not mention the fact.  He shook hands with Amos, who,
+always eager to meet new people, would have lingered.  But Lizzie
+called to him and he reluctantly withdrew.  Lydia established her guest
+with his back to the dining-room door and the evening began.
+
+The Harvard man was frankly curious.  This was his first experience
+west of New York and he was trying to classify his impressions.  The
+beauty of Lake City had intrigued him at first, he told Lydia, into
+believing that he was merely in a transplanted New England town.  "And
+you know there are plenty of New Englanders on the faculty and many of
+the people of Lake Shore Avenue are second and third generation New
+Englanders.  But the townspeople as a whole!"  He stopped with a groan.
+
+"What's the matter with them?" Lydia asked, a trifle belligerently.
+She was sitting on the couch, chin cupped in her hand, watching her
+caller so intently that she was forgetting to be bashful.
+
+"Oh, you know they're so exactly like my classes in
+Shakespeare--raw-minded, no background, and plenty of them are of New
+England descent!  I don't understand it.  It's New England without its
+ancient soul, your Middle West."
+
+"I don't know what you mean by background," said Lydia.
+
+"But, Miss Dudley, you have it!  Something, your reading or your
+environment has given you a mental referendum, as it were.  You get
+more out of your Shakespeare than most of your mates because you
+understand so many of his references.  You must have been a wide reader
+or your father and mother taught you well."
+
+"I--you've got the wrong impression about me," Lydia protested.  "I've
+read always and mostly good things, thanks to Mr. Levine, but so have
+many other people in Lake City."
+
+Professor Willis looked at Lydia thoughtfully.  "Levine?  I thought he
+was a cheap scamp."
+
+Lydia flushed.  "He's my best friend and a finely read man.  He's kept
+me supplied with books."
+
+"Finely read, on the one hand," exclaimed Willis, "and on the other
+robbing Indians.  How do you account for it?"
+
+Lydia did not stir.  She continued with her crystal gaze on this wise
+man from the East, struggling to get his viewpoint.  There flashed into
+her mind the thought that perhaps, when she knew him better, he could
+help her on the Indian question.
+
+"I can't account for it," she said.  "I wish I could.  Except for a
+French Canadian great-grandfather, Mr. Levine's a New Englander too."
+
+"New Englander!  Pshaw!  Outside of Lake Shore Avenue and the college
+there are no New Englanders here.  They are hollow mockeries, unless,"
+he stared at Lydia through his gold-rimmed glass, "unless you are a
+reversion to type, yourself."
+
+Lizzie spoke from the dining-room.  "The chocolate's all ready, Lydia."
+
+"Oh, I forgot," exclaimed Lydia, flying out of the room and returning
+with a tray of chocolate and cake.  "The cold walk must have made you
+hungry."
+
+Willis drew up to the table, and over his cup of chocolate remarked,
+"Ah--pardon me if I comment on the wonderful pieces of mahogany you
+have."
+
+Lydia set down her cup.  "Why, I hate it!" she cried.
+
+"Hate  it!  It's  priceless!  Family  pieces?  I thought so!  What
+delicious cake!  How kind of your mother!  I'd like to meet her, if I
+may."
+
+"I made the cake, Professor Willis.  My--my mother is not living."
+
+The Harvard man's stilted manner left him.  He set down his cup
+hastily.  "Oh, my dear!" he exclaimed.  "I was tactless!  Forgive me!"
+Again he looked about the room and back at Lydia's face above the
+meager dress fashioned the year before from a cheap remnant.  Could a
+mother's death, he wondered, have put the look into her eyes and lips
+he had often surprised there.  "I suppose," he said finally, "that one
+might explain you, eventually, if one had the privilege of knowing you
+long enough, I--"
+
+Adam chose this moment to yelp at the dining-room door which was barely
+ajar.
+
+"Adam, be quiet!" roared Amos.  "Liz, did you see my carpet slippers
+anywhere?" he added in a lower voice.
+
+"I brought you a book," said Willis.  "Browning's Dramatic Lyrics."
+
+"I'd like to read them," Lydia spoke eagerly, with one ear on the
+dining-room.
+
+Amos yawned loudly.  "Did you wind the clock, Lizzie?  No?  Well, I
+will!"  Another loud yawn and Amos was heard to begin on the mechanism
+of the huge old wall clock which wound with a sound like an
+old-fashioned chain pump.  Lydia set her teeth in misery.
+
+"Yes, you must add Browning to your background," said the Harvard man,
+appearing undisturbed by the sounds in the next room.  "Browning is
+difficult at times but--"  He was interrupted by a great clattering in
+the dining-room.
+
+"Lizzie!" roared Amos.  "Come here and pull this chair off of me.  The
+next time Lydia varnishes anything--"
+
+There was the sound of Lizzie pounding across the floor.  The
+dining-room door was banged and after that the murmur of Lizzie's voice
+and subdued roars from Amos.  Lydia looked at Willis in an agony of
+embarrassment.
+
+"Well," he said, rising, "it's quite a walk back to the trolley.
+Perhaps I'd better be going."
+
+Lydia rose with alacrity.  "I'm--I'm glad you like the mahogany," she
+said awkwardly.
+
+"Er--yes.  So am I," returned Willis, making for the door as Amos
+groaned again.  "Good night, Miss Dudley."
+
+"Good night," said Lydia, and closing the door with a gasp of relief
+she dashed for the dining-room.
+
+"Just when I'm trying to be refined and lady-like!" she wailed.  Then
+she stopped.
+
+"Lydia," roared Amos, "if you ever touch my chair again!  Look at my
+shirt and pants!"
+
+Lydia looked and from these to the chair, denuded of the two coats of
+varnish.  "But you knew it wasn't dry," she protested.
+
+"How could I remember?" cried Amos.  "I just sat down a minute to put
+on my slippers you'd hid."
+
+"I don't see why you couldn't have been quiet about it," Lydia half
+sobbed.  "We were having such a nice time and all of a sudden it
+sounded like an Irish wake out here.  It embarrassed Professor Willis
+so he went right home and I know he'll never come back."
+
+"I should hope he wouldn't," retorted Amos.  "Of course, what a college
+professor thinks is more important than my comfort.  Why, that varnish
+went through my shirt to my skin.  Liz, what are you laughing at?"
+
+Lizzie had suppressed her laughter till she was weak.  "At you, Amos!
+Till my dying day, I'll never forget how you looked prancing round the
+room with that chair glued to your back!"
+
+"Oh, Daddy!  It must have been funny!" cried Lydia, beginning to giggle.
+
+Amos looked uncertainly at his two women folk, and then his lips
+twisted and he laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.
+
+"Lydia!  Lydia!" he cried, "don't try to be elegant with any more of
+your callers!  It's too hard on your poor old father!"
+
+"I won't," replied Lydia.  "He likes the mahogany, anyway.  But he'll
+never come again," she added, with sudden gloom.  "Not that I care,
+stiff old Harvard thing," and she patted Adam and went soberly to bed.
+
+But Professor Willis did come again.  Not so frequently, of course, as
+to compromise his dignity.  An instructor who called on freshman girls
+was always laughed at.  But several times during the winter and spring
+he appeared at the cottage, and talked with Lydia earnestly and
+intellectually.  Nor did he always confine his calls to the evening.
+
+One Sunday afternoon in March Amos was in town with John Levine, who
+was on one of his hurried visits home, when Billy Norton came over to
+the cottage.
+
+Lydia, who was poring over "The Ring and the Book," saw at once that
+something was wrong.
+
+"What's worrying you, Billy?" she asked.
+
+"Lydia," he said, dropping into Amos' chair and folding his big arms,
+"you know my tract of land--the one I was going to buy from an Indian?
+I paid young Lone Wolf a ten dollar option on it while I looked round
+to see how I could raise enough to pay him a fair price.  He's only a
+kid of seventeen and stone blind from trachoma.  Well, yesterday I
+found that Marshall had bought it in.  Of course, I didn't really think
+Lone Wolf knew what an option was, but Marshall and the Indian Agent
+and Levine and all the rest knew what I was trying to do, so I thought
+they'd keep their hands off."
+
+"What a shame!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"Yes," said Billy grimly, a certain tensity in his tones that made
+Lydia look at him more closely, "Yes, a shame.  The way Marshall did it
+was this.  He looked young Lone Wolf up and gave him a bag of candy.
+The Indians are crazy for candy.  Then he told him to make his cross on
+a piece of paper.  That that was a receipt that he was to keep and if
+he'd show it at the store whenever he wanted candy, he'd have all he
+wanted, for nothing.  And he had two half-breeds witness it.  What
+Marshall had done was to get Lone Wolf to sign a warranty deed, giving
+Marshall his pine land.  The poor devil of an Indian didn't know it
+till yesterday when he showed me his 'receipt' in great glee.  Of
+course, they'll swear he's a mixed blood."
+
+Lydia was speechless with disgust for a moment, then she burst out,
+"Oh, I wish that reservation had never been heard of!  It demoralizes
+every one who comes in contact with it."
+
+"Lydia," said Billy, slowly, "I'm going to expose Marshall."
+
+"What do you mean?" Lydia looked a little frightened.
+
+"I mean that I'm going to show up his crooked deals with the Indians.
+I'm going to rip this reservation graft wide open.  I'm not going to
+touch an acre of the land myself so I can go in with clean hands and
+I'm not going to forget that I came pretty close to being a skunk,
+myself."
+
+"Oh, but, Billy!" cried Lydia.  "There's John Levine and all our
+friends--oh, you can't do it!"
+
+"Look here, Lydia," Billy's voice was stern, "are you for or against
+Indian graft?"
+
+Lydia drew a long breath but was spared an immediate answer for there
+was a knock on the door and Kent came in, followed shortly by Professor
+Willis.
+
+"Well," said Kent, after Lydia had settled them all comfortably, "I
+just left Charlie Jackson--poor old prune!"
+
+"Oh, how is he?" asked Lydia eagerly, "and what is he doing?"
+
+"He's pretty seedy," answered Kent.  "He's been trying to keep the
+whites off the reservation by organizing the full bloods to stand
+against the half-breeds.  But after a year of trying he's given up
+hope.  The full bloods are fatalists, you know, and Charlie has gone
+back to it himself."
+
+"Charlie Jackson is an old schoolmate of ours."  Lydia turned to Willis
+and gave him a rapid sketch of Charlie's life.  The Harvard man was
+deeply interested.
+
+"Can't you get him back to his work with the doctor?" he asked Kent.
+
+Kent shook his head.  "The only way to keep an Indian from reverting is
+to put him where he never can see his people or the reservation.
+Charlie's given up.  He's drinking a little."
+
+"And still you folks will keep on, stealing the reservation!" exclaimed
+Billy.
+
+Kent gave Billy a grin, half irritated, half whimsical.  "I know it's
+Sunday, old man, but don't let's have a sermon.  You're a farmer, Bill,
+anyhow, no matter what else you try to be."
+
+"Thank God for that," laughed Billy.
+
+"My word!" ejaculated Willis.  "What a country!  You spout the classics
+on week days and on holidays you steal from the aborigines!"
+
+"Oh, here, draw it mild, Professor!" growled Kent.
+
+"Well, but it's true," exclaimed Lydia.  "Where's our old New England
+sense of fairness?"
+
+"That's good too," said Kent.  "Who was brisker than our forefathers at
+killing redskins?"
+
+"Altogether a different case," returned the Harvard man.  "Our
+forefathers killed in self-defense.  You folks are killing out of
+wanton greed."
+
+"That's the point, exactly," said Billy.
+
+Kent gave his cheerful grin.  "Call it what you please," he laughed.
+"As long as the whites _will_ have the land, I'm going to get my share."
+
+Nobody spoke for a moment.  Lydia looked from Billy to Kent, and back
+again.  Kent was by far the handsomer of the two.  He had kept the
+brilliant color and the charming glow in his eyes that had belonged to
+his boyhood.  He dressed well, and sat now, knees crossed, hands
+clasped behind his head, with easy grace.  Billy was a six-footer,
+larger than Kent and inclined to be raw-boned.  His mouth was humorous
+and sensitive, his gray eyes were searching.
+
+"Let's not talk about it," Lydia said.  "Let's go out in the kitchen
+and pop corn and make candy."  This with a little questioning glance at
+the professor of Shakespeare.  He, however, rose with alacrity, and the
+rest of the afternoon passed without friction.  Willis developed a
+positive passion for making popcorn balls and he left with Kent at dusk
+proudly bearing off a bag of the results of his labors.
+
+Billy stayed after the rest and helped Lydia to clean up the dishes.
+Kent would never have thought of this, Lydia said to herself with a
+vague pang.  When they had finished Billy gravely took Lydia's coat
+from the hook and said, "Come, woman, and walk in the gloaming with
+your humble servant."
+
+Lydia giggled and obeyed.  There was still snow, in the hollows but the
+road was clear and frozen hard.  They walked briskly till a rise in the
+road gave them a view of the lake and a scarlet rift in the sky where
+the sun had sunk in a bank of clouds.
+
+"Now, Lydia," said Billy, "answer my question.  Are you for or against
+Indian graft?"
+
+"I just won't take sides," announced Lydia, obstinately.
+
+Billy stepped round in front of the young girl and put both hands
+gently on her shoulders.  "Look at me, Lydia," he said.  "You have to
+take sides!  You can't escape it.  You mean too much to too many of us
+men.  You've got to take a perfectly clear stand on questions like
+this.  It means too much to America for you not to.  Your influence
+counts, in that way if in no other, don't you see."
+
+Lydia's throat tightened.  "I won't take sides against Mr. Levine," she
+repeated.
+
+"Do you mean that you don't want me to expose Marshall?" asked Billy.
+
+"You've no right to ask me that."  Lydia's voice was cross.
+
+"But I have.  Lydia, though you don't want it, my life is yours.  No
+matter whether we can ever be anything else, we are friends, aren't we,
+friends in the deepest sense of the word,--aren't we, Lydia?"
+
+Lydia stared at Billy in silence.  Perhaps it was the glow from the
+west that helped to deepen and soften his gray eyes, for there was
+nothing searching in them now.  There was a depth and loyalty in them
+and a something besides that reminded her vaguely of the way John
+Levine looked at her.  A crow cawed faintly from the woods and the wind
+fluttered Billy's hair.
+
+Friendship!  Something very warm and high and fine entered Lydia's
+heart.
+
+"Yes, we are friends.  Billy," she said slowly.  "But oh, Billy, don't
+make me decide that!"
+
+"Lydia, you must!  You can't have a friend and not share his problems
+and you can't live in a community and not share its problems, if you're
+going to be worth anything to the world."
+
+"But if the problems really meant anything to you," protested Lydia,
+"you wouldn't depend on some girl to shove you into them."
+
+"But men do.  They are built that way.  Not _some_ girl but _the girl_.
+Every great cause was fought for some woman!  Oh, Lydia, Lydia!"
+
+"Billy," Lydia looked away from him to the lake, "you'll have to let me
+think about it.  You see, it's deciding my attitude toward all my
+friends, even toward Dad.  And I hadn't intended ever to decide."
+
+"And will you tell me, to-morrow, or next day, Lydia?"
+
+"I'll tell you as soon as I decide," she answered.
+
+Amos brought John Levine home with him for supper.  It seemed to Lydia
+that Levine never had been dearer to her than he was that evening.
+After supper, they drew up around the base burner in the old way, while
+the two men smoked.  Lizzie sat rocking and rubbing her
+rheumatism-racked old hands and Adam, who snored worse as he grew old,
+wheezed with his head baking under the stove.  Levine did not talk of
+the Indians, to Lydia's relief, but of Washington politics.  As the
+evening drew to a close, and Amos went out to his chickens as usual
+after Lizzie had gone to bed, John turned to Lydia.
+
+"What are you reading, these days, young Lydia?"
+
+"Browning--'The Ring and the Book,'" replied Lydia.
+
+John shook his head.  "Really grown up, aren't you, Lydia?  Do you
+enjoy being a young lady?"
+
+"Yes, I do, only I miss the old days when I saw so much of you."
+
+"Do you, my dear?" asked Levine, eagerly.  "In what ways do you miss
+me?"
+
+"Oh, every way!  No one will ever understand me as you do."
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  There are Billy and Kent."
+
+Lydia shook her head, though Billy's face in the moonlight after the
+graduation party, returned unexpectedly to her memory as she did so.
+
+"There'll never be any one like you."  Then moved by a sudden impulse
+she leaned toward him and said, "No matter what happens, you will
+always know that I love you, won't you, Mr. Levine?"
+
+John looked at the wistful face, keenly.  "Why, what could happen,
+young Lydia?"
+
+"Oh, lots of things!  I'm grown up now and--and I have to make
+decisions about the rightness and the wrongness of things.  But no
+matter what I decide, _nothing_ can change my love for you."
+
+"Lydia, come here," said Levine, abruptly.
+
+In the old way, Lydia came to his side and he pulled her down to the
+arm of his chair.  For a moment they sat in silence, his arm about her,
+her cheek against his hair, staring into the glowing stove.
+
+"When you were just a little tot," said Levine at last, "you were full
+of gumption and did your own thinking.  And I've been glad to see you
+keep the habit.  Always make your own decisions, dear.  Don't let me or
+any one else decide matters of conscience for you.  'To thine own self
+be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be
+false to any man.'  Eh, little girl?"
+
+He rose as he heard Amos coming in the back door, and with his hand
+under Lydia's chin, he looked long and earnestly into her eyes.  Then
+as Billy had done earlier in the evening, he sighed, "Oh, Lydia!
+Lydia!" and turned away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS
+
+
+"Nothing is so proud or so brave as the young pine when it first tops
+the rest of the forest."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+For several days Lydia was unhappy and absent-minded.  At first, in her
+thoughts she was inclined to blame Billy for forcing this turmoil of
+mind on her.  But, a little later, she admitted to herself that for
+years, something within her had been demanding that she take a stand on
+the Indian question something to which Charlie Jackson and Billy had
+appealed, something which Kent and John Levine had ignored.  Yet
+neither Charlie nor Billy had really forced her to a decision.
+
+Lydia was grown up.  All her young life she had carried the
+responsibilities and had faced the home tragedies that come usually
+only to grown folk.  Now, in her young womanhood it was natural and
+inevitable that she should turn to the larger responsibilities of the
+living world about her in order to satisfy the larger needs of her
+maturity.
+
+Yet, still old affection fought with new clarity of vision.  Old
+loyalty quarreled with new understanding.  Bit by bit she went over her
+thinking life, beginning with her first recollection of Charlie Jackson
+in the class in Civil Government, and all that was feminine and blind
+devotion in her fought desperately with all that education and her
+civic-minded forefathers had given her.
+
+Coming home from her last recitation, one mild afternoon, she stopped
+at the gate and looked up into the pine tree.  Its scent carried her
+back to the cloistered wood on the reservation and once more the desire
+for the soil was on her.  She leaned against the giant tree trunk and
+looked out over the lake, steel blue and cold in the March sunshine.
+And there with the lowing of the Norton herds and the hoarse call of
+the crows mingling with the soft voice of the pine and the lapping of
+the lake, she made her decision.  For clearly as though the pine had
+put it into words, something said to Lydia that it was not her business
+to decide whether or not the Indians deserved to live.  It was her
+business to recognize that in their method of killing the Indians, the
+whites had been utterly dishonorable.  That her refusing to take a
+stand could not exonerate them.  History would not fail to record the
+black fact against her race that, a free people, the boasted vanguard
+of human liberty, Americans had first made a race dependent, then by
+fraud and faithlessness, by cruelty and debauchery, were utterly
+destroying it.  And finally, that by closing her eyes to the facts,
+because of her love for Levine, she was herself sharing the general
+taint.
+
+It was Lydia's first acknowledgment of her responsibility to America,
+and it left her a little breathless and trembling.  She turned back to
+the road and made her way swiftly to the Norton place.  She did not go
+into the house, but down the lane where she could see Billy putting up
+the bars after the cattle.  He waited for her, leaning against the
+rails.
+
+"Billy," she said, panting, her cheeks bright and her yellow hair
+blowing, "I'm against the Indian grafting."
+
+Billy put out his hand, solemnly, and the two shook hands.  For all
+Billy was four years older than Lydia, they both were very, very young.
+So young that they believed that they could fight single-handed the
+whole world of intrigue and greed in which their little community was
+set.  So young that they trembled and were filled with awe at the vast
+importance of their own dreams.  And yet, futile as they may seem, it
+is on young decisions such as these that the race creeps upward!
+
+"What are you going to do, Billy?" asked Lydia.
+
+"I'm going to get a government investigation started, somehow," he
+replied.  "It'll take time, but I'll get it."
+
+Lydia looked at him admiringly, then she shivered a little.  "I hate to
+think of it, but I'll stand by you, Billy, whatever you do."
+
+"I'm going into ex-Senator Alvord's law office this June.  I'll bet
+he'll help.  He's so sore at Levine.  It'll be lovely muckraking, Lyd!"
+
+"I hate to think of it," she said unsteadily.  "Lizzie is miserable,
+to-day.  Will you tell your mother, Billy, and ask her to come over to
+see her this evening?  I mustn't stop any longer now."
+
+Poor old Lizzie was miserable, indeed.  For years, she had struggled
+against rheumatism, but now it had bound her, hand and foot.  Ma Norton
+came over in the evening.  Lizzie was in bed shivering and flushed and
+moaning with pain.
+
+"Now, don't bother about me," she insisted.  "Lydia's threatening to
+stay home to-morrow, and I tell you I won't have it," and the poor old
+soul began to cry weakly.
+
+Ma pulled the covers over the shaking shoulders.  "If I were you,
+Lizzie, I'd think about getting well and let Lydia do what she thinks
+best.  A day or so out of school isn't going to count in the long run
+with a young thing like her."
+
+She waited till Lizzie slept, then she told Lydia and Amos that Dr.
+Fulton had better be called, and Amos with a worried air, started for
+town at once.
+
+Dr. Fulton shook his head and sighed.
+
+"She's in for a run of rheumatic fever.  Get some extra hot water
+bottles and make up your mind for a long siege, Lydia."
+
+And it was a long siege.  Six weeks of agony for Lizzie, of nursing and
+housework and worrying for Lydia.  Ma Norton and the neighbors gave
+what time they could, but the brunt, of course, fell on Lydia.  She
+fretted most about her college work.  Sitting by Lizzie's bed, when the
+old lady dozed in her brief respites from pain, she tried to carry on
+her lessons alone, but with indifferent success.  She was too tired to
+concentrate her mind.  Trigonometry rapidly became a hopeless tangle to
+her; Ancient History a stupid jumble of unrelated dates.  And most of
+all, as the days went by, she felt the indifference of University folk.
+Nobody cared that she had dropped out, it seemed to her.
+
+Billy called every evening on his way home to supper.  He filled water
+buckets, chopped wood and fed the chickens, that Amos might be free to
+take Lydia's place.  John Levine sat up two or three nights a week.
+Kent came out once a week, with a cheery word and a basket of fruit.
+And at frequent intervals, the Marshall surrey stopped at the gate and
+Elviry or Dave appeared with some of Elviry's delicious cookery for
+Lydia and Amos.
+
+One afternoon in April when Lizzie had at last taken a turn for the
+better, Lydia elected to clean the kitchen floor.  She was down on her
+hands and knees scrubbing when there came a soft tap on the open door.
+She looked up.  Professor Willis was standing on the steps.
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia, rising with burning cheeks.
+
+"I--I couldn't make any one hear at the front door.  I came to see why
+you didn't come to class."
+
+Lydia was wearing a faded and outgrown blue gingham.  Her face was
+flushed but there were black rings round her eyes, and she was too
+tired to be polite.
+
+"I think it's just awful for you to come on me, scrubbing floors!  You
+should have knocked at the front door, till I heard," she said, crossly.
+
+The Harvard man looked at her seriously.  "I really never saw a girl
+playing golf look as pretty as you do, scrubbing floors.  May I come
+in?"
+
+He did not wait for an invitation but stepped over the pail and brush
+to the chair beside the table.  An open book lay on the chair.  He
+picked it up.  "'Ancient Rome,'" he read.
+
+"I'm trying to keep up."  Lydia was drying her red hands on the roller
+towel.  Her shoulders drooped despondently.  "What's the use of trying
+to be a lady," she said, suddenly, "when you have to fight poverty like
+this!  You oughtn't to have come on me this way!"
+
+The Harvard man looked from the immaculate kitchen to the slender girl,
+with her fine head, and then at the book in his hand.
+
+"Of course, I've never known a girl like you.  But I should imagine
+that eventually you'll achieve something finer out of your poverty than
+the other girls at the University will out of their golf and tennis.  I
+don't fancy that our New England mothers were ashamed of scrubbing
+floors."
+
+He looked at her with a smile on his pale face.  Suddenly Lydia smiled
+in return.  "Sit down while I make us some tea," she said.  "I'll never
+try to play lady with you again."
+
+Willis stayed with her an hour, sitting in the kitchen where the open
+door showed the turquoise lake through a gray-green net of swelling
+tree buds.  He did not leave till Lizzie wakened.  He cleared up the
+tangle in Lydia's trigonometry for her and went over the lost lessons
+in Shakespeare, all the while with a vague lump in his throat over the
+wistful eagerness in the blue eyes opposite his, over the thin, red,
+watersoaked hands that turned the leaves of the books.
+
+When Billy called that evening he found Lydia more cheerful than she
+had been in weeks.  When she told him of her caller he looked at her
+thoughtfully and growled, "I hope he chokes," and not another word did
+he say while he finished Amos' chores.
+
+Professor Willis came out regularly after this and when Lydia returned
+to class work in May, she was able to work creditably through the
+reviews then taking place and in June to pass the examinations.
+
+During all this time she said nothing to Billy about his muckraking
+campaign.  In spite of her high resolves she half hoped he had given it
+up.  But she did not know Billy as well as she thought she did.  He
+finished his law course in June and entered ex-Senator Alvord's office
+as he had planned.  There was another election in the fall and John
+Levine was returned to Congress, this time almost without a struggle.
+So many of the voters of the community were profiting by the alienating
+of the mixed-blood pines that it would have been blatant hypocrisy on
+the part of Republicans as well as Democrats to have opposed him.  In
+fact, thanks to Levine, the town had entered on a period of
+unprecedented prosperity.  The college itself had purchased for a song
+a section of land to be used as an agricultural experiment station.
+
+Like a bomb, then, late in December fell the news that the Indian
+Commissioner had been called before a senate committee to answer
+questions regarding the relations of Lake City to the reservation.
+While following close on the heels of this announcement came word that
+a congressional commission of three had been appointed to sit at Lake
+City to investigate Indian matters.
+
+"Billy, how did you do it?" asked Lydia, in consternation.  He had
+overtaken her one bitter cold January afternoon, on her way home from
+college.
+
+"I didn't do much," said Billy.  "I just got affidavits, dozens of
+them, showing frauds, and gave them to Senator Alvord.  He has a lot of
+influence among the Democratic senators and is a personal friend of the
+President.  It was a wonderful chance, he saw, to hurt the Republicans,
+even though there were Democrats implicated.  The Indian Commissioner
+and Levine are both Republicans, you know.  Then, when he finally got
+the hearing before the Senate Committee, he smuggled Charlie Jackson
+and Susie and old Chief Wolf down there.  Nobody here knows that."
+
+Lydia's lips were set tightly as she plodded along the snowy road.
+
+"Billy," she said, finally, "are you doing this to get even with Dave
+Marshall?"
+
+"Lydia!" cried Billy, catching her arm and forcing her to stop and face
+him.  "Don't you know me better than that?  Don't you?"
+
+"Then why are you doing it?" demanded Lydia.
+
+"I'm doing it because I'm ashamed of what New Englanders have done with
+their heritage.  And I'm doing it for you.  To make a name for you.
+Look at me.  No, not at the lake, into my eyes.  You are going to marry
+me, some day, Lydia."
+
+"I'm not," said Lydia flatly.
+
+Billy laughed.  "You can't help yourself, honey.  It's fate for both of
+us.  Come along home!  You're shivering."
+
+"When you talk that way, I hate you!" exclaimed Lydia, but Billy only
+laughed again.
+
+Amos at first was furious when he heard of the investigation.  He, with
+every one else in town, was eager to know who had started the trouble.
+
+"Some sorehead," said Amos, "who couldn't get all the land he wanted,
+I'll bet.  And a sweet time the commission will have.  Why, they'll
+have to dig into the private history of every one in Lake City.  It'll
+ruin Levine!  Oh, pshaw!  No, it won't either!  He can get everything
+whitewashed.  That's the way American investigations always end!"
+
+But Levine could not get everything whitewashed.  The group of three
+commissioners sat for months and in that time they exposed to the
+burning sun of publicity the muck of thievery and dishonor on which
+Lake City's placid beauty was built.
+
+By some strange turn of fortune, Congress had chosen three honest men
+for this unsavory task, three men grimly and unswervingly determined to
+see the matter through.  They sat in rooms in the post-office building.
+In and out of the building day after day passed the Indians to face the
+sullen and unwilling whites summoned to hear and answer what these
+Indians had to say of them.  Charlie Jackson acted as interpreter.
+Lydia saw him once or twice on the street when he nodded coolly.  He
+had dropped his white associates completely.
+
+The local papers refused to report the commission's session.  But
+papers outside the State were voracious for the news and little by
+little tales were published to the world that made Lake City citizens
+when out of the city, hesitate to confess the name of their home town.
+
+The leading trustee of the Methodist Church was found to have married a
+squaw in order to get her pine and her pitiful Government allowance.
+His white wife and children left him when this was proved to them, and
+it was proved only when the starving squaw and her starving children
+were finally acknowledged by the trustee before the commission.
+
+The Methodists were held up to scorn for a few months until a prominent
+Presbyterian who was the leading grocer in town was found to have
+supplied the Indian Agent for years with tainted groceries for the
+Indians.
+
+The most popular dentist in town filled teeth for the Indians whenever
+they received their allowances.  His method of filling was simple.  He
+drove empty copper cartridge caps over the teeth.  These when burnished
+made a handsome showing until gangrene set in.  The afflicted Indians
+were then turned over to a popular young doctor of Lake City who took
+the next year's allowance from the bewildered patients.
+
+Marriage after marriage of squaws with Lake City citizens was
+unearthed, most of these same citizens also having a white family.
+Hundreds of tracts of lands that had been obtained by stealing or by
+fraud from full bloods were listed.  Bags of candy, bits of jewelry,
+bolts of cotton had been exchanged for pine worth thousands of dollars.
+
+It was a nerve-racking period for Lake City.  Whether purposely or not,
+the net did not begin to close round John Levine till toward the end of
+the hearing.  Nor did Levine come home until late in the summer, when
+the commission had been sitting for some months.
+
+In spite of a sense of apprehension that would not lift, the year was a
+happy one for Lydia.  In the first place, she went to three college
+dancing parties during the year.  The adaptability of the graduation
+gown was wonderful and although Lydia knew that she was only a little
+frump compared with the other girls, Billy, who took her each time,
+always wore the _dress suit_!  So she shone happily in reflected
+elegance.
+
+In the second place, three men called on her regularly--Billy, Kent and
+Professor Willis.
+
+In the third place, Kent asked her to go with him to the last party
+and, to Lydia's mind, a notable conversation took place at that time.
+
+"Thanks, Kent," said Lydia, carelessly, "but I'm going with Billy."
+
+"Billy!  Always Billy!" snorted Kent.  "Why, you and I were friends
+before we ever heard of Billy!"
+
+"Yes," returned Lydia calmly, "and in all these years this is the first
+time you've asked me to go to a party.  I've often wondered why."
+
+Kent moved uncomfortably.  "Pshaw, Lyd, you know I always went with
+some girl I was having a crush on--that was why."
+
+"And don't you ever ask a girl to go to a party unless you have a crush
+on her?" asked Lydia, mischievously.
+
+Kent gave her a clear look.  "No!" he replied.
+
+Lydia flushed, then she said, slowly, "That's only half true, Kent.
+You've always liked me as I have you.  But you've always been ashamed
+of my clothes.  I don't blame you a bit, but you can imagine how I feel
+about Billy, who's taken me, clothes or no clothes."
+
+It was Kent's turn to flush and he did so to such an extent that Lydia
+was sorry for him while she waited for him to answer.
+
+"Hang it, Lyd, I've been an infernal cad, that's all!"
+
+"And," Lydia went on, mercilessly, "I've got nothing to wear now but
+the same old graduating dress.  I suppose you were hoping for better
+things?"
+
+"Stop it!" Kent shouted.  "I deserve it, but I'm not going to take it.
+I'm asking you for just one reason and that is, I've waked up to the
+fact that you're the finest girl in the world.  No one can hold a
+candle to you."
+
+There was a sudden lilt in Lydia's voice that did not escape Kent as
+she answered laughingly, "Well, if you feel the same after seeing
+Margery this summer, I'll be glad to go to one of the hops next fall
+with you, and thank you, deeply, Mr. Moulton."
+
+"All right," said Kent, soberly.  "The first hop next fall is mine and
+as many more as I can get."
+
+It was late in the spring and after the conversation with Kent, that it
+began to be rumored about town that ex-Senator Alvord's office was at
+the bottom of the Indian investigation.  Billy had been called in to
+testify and had shown an uncanny amount of knowledge of fraudulent land
+deals and Alvord had corroborated many of his statements.
+
+Kent accused Billy of this openly, one Sunday afternoon at Lydia's.
+They were sitting on the lake shore, for the day was parching hot.
+Both the young men were in flannels and hatless, and lolled on the
+grass at Lydia's feet, as she sat with her back against a tree.  She
+noticed how Kent was all grace, and ease, while Billy, whose face had
+lately become thinner, was all gaunt angles.
+
+"I'm willing to take the blame, if necessary," said Billy.
+
+Kent sat up with sudden energy.  "Look here, if it once got round town
+that you're the father of this, you'll be run out of Lake City."
+
+Billy laughed.  "Oh, no I won't!  All you respectable citizens have got
+too many troubles of your own."
+
+"Nice thing to do to your friends and neighbors, Bill," Kent went on,
+excitement growing in his voice as he realized the import of Billy's
+acknowledgment.  "What the deuce did you do it for?"
+
+Billy shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.  Kent appealed to Lydia.
+"Would you have gone to parties with him if you'd known what he was
+doing to his town, Lyd?"
+
+Billy was still lying on both elbows, industriously herding a pair of
+ants.  He did not look up at Lydia as she stared at his massive blond
+head.
+
+"Kent, I knew it," said Lydia, after a pause.
+
+"You knew it!  You let a lot of sickly sentimentality ruin Lake City in
+the eyes of the world?  Not only that.  Think what's coming to John
+Levine!  Think what's coming to me, though I've done little enough!"
+
+"Then I'm glad it came to stop you; while you'd still done little!"
+cried Lydia.
+
+"Nonsense!" snapped Kent.  "Of course, you don't expect anything but
+gush from a girl about the Indians.  But I don't see what you get out
+of it, Bill.  Who's paying you?  Are you going to run for president on
+the purity ticket?"
+
+"There's no use in my trying to tell you why I did it," grunted Billy.
+
+"No, there isn't," agreed Kent.  "But I'll tell you this much.  Bill,
+you and I break right here and now.  I've no use for a sneak."
+
+Again Billy shrugged his shoulders.  Lydia looked at the two in
+despair, then she smiled and cried, "Oh, there's Margery!  Isn't she
+lovely!"
+
+It was Margery, just home from boarding-school, where she gaily
+announced as she shook hands she had been "finally finished."
+
+"Though," she added.  "Daddy wants to pack me right off again because
+of this silly investigation.  As if I wanted to miss the fun of viewing
+all our best family skeletons!"
+
+"Margery," cried Lydia, quickly, "you're so beautiful that you're
+simply above envy.  What a duck of a dress!"
+
+"Isn't it!" agreed Margery.  "Kent, do get me a chair.  I'll spoil all
+my ruffles on the grass.  Well!  Here I am!  And what were you all
+discussing so solemnly when I interrupted?"
+
+"Indian graft!" said Billy, laconically.
+
+"Isn't it awful!  And isn't it funny!  You know, I was actually proud
+that I lived in Lake City.  The girls used to point me out in school to
+visitors."
+
+Margery, exquisite in her dainty gown, her wonderful black eyes
+gleaming with fun, as a sample of Lake City dishonesty appealed to the
+sense of humor of her audience and they all laughed, though Lydia felt
+her throat tighten strangely as she did so,--Margery, made exquisite on
+the money of blind squaws and papooses that froze to death!
+
+"Daddy is all worked up, though I told him they certainly hadn't done
+anything much to him, so far, and I'd feel real neglected if they
+didn't find he had an Indian wife up his sleeve," Margery went on.
+"Oh, Billy, by the way.  Daddy says he thinks Senator Alvord started
+the whole thing.  Did he?"
+
+"Yes, and I helped," replied Billy shortly.
+
+"Well, I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself," cried Margery,
+airily.  "Don't you, Lydia?"
+
+"No, I don't, I'm proud of him, though I'm scared to death," said
+Lydia.  "Things are so much worse than I thought they'd be."
+
+"Well, I just tell you, Billy Norton," there was a sudden shrill note
+in Margery's voice, "if anything really horrid is unearthed about
+Daddy, I'll never speak to you again.  Would you, Kent?"
+
+"I don't intend to anyhow," replied Kent, coolly.  "How'd you come out,
+Marg?"
+
+"I walked from the trolley.  I'd no idea it was so hot."
+
+"Let me take you home in my toot-toot."
+
+"But I just got here," protested Margery.
+
+"It's now or never," said Kent, rising, "I've got to run along."
+
+"Oh, if it's that serious!"  Margery took Kent's arm.  "By-by, Lydia!
+Come over and see my new dresses."
+
+After they were gone, Billy sat up and looked at Lydia.  Neither spoke
+for a few moments.  The sun was sinking and all the world was enveloped
+in a crimson dust.  There had been a drought now for six weeks.  Even
+Amos' garden was languishing.
+
+"Lydia," said Billy, "I'm going to quit.  You know I've worked with
+Charlie Jackson right along."
+
+"Quit?  But Billy, why I--I didn't think you minded Kent and Margery
+that much!"
+
+"I don't mind them at all.  But, Lydia, I found yesterday my father got
+one hundred and twenty acres from a ten-year-old full-blood boy for
+five dollars and a bicycle.  Last week Charlie unearthed a full-blood
+squaw from whom your father had gotten two hundred and forty acres for
+an old sewing machine and twenty-five dollars.  I've done so much for
+the Indians and Charlie is so fond of you that he'll shut these Indians
+up, but I can't go on, after that, of course."
+
+Lydia was motionless.  Over the house top, the great branches of the
+pine were turned to flames.  The long drawn notes of a locust sounded
+above the steady drone of the crickets.  Lydia had a curiously old
+feeling.
+
+"I can't go on, Lydia," Billy repeated.  "My fine old father and dear
+old Amos!  I can't."
+
+"Yes, you'll go on, Billy," Lydia's voice was very low.  "After I faced
+what would come to John Levine through this, I can face anything."
+
+Billy gave a little groan and bowed his head on Lydia's knee.  Suddenly
+she felt years older than Billy.  She smoothed his tumbled blond hair.
+
+"Go on, Billy.  Our ancestors left England for conscience' sake.  And
+our grandfathers both laid down their lives for the Union."
+
+Lydia ended with a little gulp of embarrassment.  Billy caught her hand
+and sat up, looking eagerly through the gloaming at her face.
+
+"I told you all the battles of the world were fought for a woman," he
+said.  "Dear, I'll go on, though it'll break mother's heart."
+
+"It won't break her heart," said Lydia.  "Women's hearts don't break
+over that sort of thing."
+
+"Lydia!" called Amos from the doorway, "aren't you going to give me any
+supper to-night?"
+
+"Lord, it's two hours past milking time!" groaned Billy, and he started
+on a dog-trot for home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+DUCIT AMOR PATRIAE
+
+
+"The same soil that nourishes the Indian and the white, nourishes me.
+Yet they do not know that thus we are blood brothers."--_The Murmuring
+Pine_.
+
+
+It was the last week in August when John Levine was summoned before the
+commission.  Lydia and Amos were summoned with him.
+
+Lydia was frightened, Amos was irritable and sullen by turns after the
+summons finally came.  They were due at the hearing at nine o'clock and
+arrived a little late.  Amos had refused to be hurried.
+
+The room in which the hearing was held was big and cool, with a heavily
+carpeted floor and walls lined with black walnut bookcases.  There were
+two long tables at one end of the room behind one of which sat the
+three commissioners.  At the other table were the official
+stenographers and Charlie Jackson.  Before the tables were chairs and
+here were John Levine and Kent, Pa Norton, and Billy, old Susie and a
+younger squaw, with several bucks.
+
+Lydia and her father dropped into empty seats and Lydia gave a little
+sigh of relief when Levine caught her eye across the room and smiled at
+her.  She looked at the commissioners curiously.  They were talking in
+undertones to one another and she thought that they all looked tired
+and harassed.  She knew them fairly well from the many newspaper
+pictures she had seen of them.  The fat gentleman, with penetrating
+blue eyes and a clean-shaven face, was Senator Smith of Texas.  The
+roly-poly man, with black eyes and a grizzled beard, was Senator Elway
+of Maine, and the tall, smooth-shaven man with red hair was Senator
+James of New York.
+
+"Mr. Levine," said Senator Smith, suddenly, "we are sorry to have to
+put you to this inconvenience.  Believe us, we find our task no more
+savory than you do."
+
+Levine gave his slow, sardonic grin.  "Don't apologize, gentlemen.
+Only make the ordeal as short as you can."
+
+"We have done that," said Elway.  "We found that you had carried on so
+many--er--transactions that we finally decided to choose three or four
+sample cases and let our case stand on those.  First, we have found
+that full bloods have been repeatedly sworn as mixed bloods, in order
+that their lands might be alienated.  A curious idea, Mr. Levine, to
+attempt to legalize an illegality by false swearing.  Jackson, call
+Crippled Bear."
+
+Charlie, who had been sitting with arms folded, his somber eyes on
+Lydia, spoke quickly to one of the bucks, who rose and took the empty
+chair by Charlie.
+
+He began to talk at once, Charlie interpreting slowly and carefully.
+
+"I am a mixed blood.  I speak English pretty well when I am with only
+one white.  With so many, my English goes.  Many moons ago the man
+Levine found me drunk in the snow.  He picked me up and kept me in his
+house over night.  When I was sober, he fed me.  Then he made this
+plan.  I was to gather half a dozen half-breeds together, he could
+trust.  In the spring he would come up to the reservation and talk to
+us.  I did this and he came.  We were very hungry when he met us in the
+woods and he gave us food and money.  Then he told us he was going to
+get the big fathers at Washington to let us sell our pines so we could
+always have money and food.  Never be hungry any more--never."
+
+Charlie's voice was husky as he said this and he looked at Levine with
+his teeth bared, like a wolf, Lydia thought.
+
+"Then he said while he was getting that done, he would pay us a little
+every month to go through the woods and chop down the best trees.  The
+Big Father will let whites get 'dead and down' timber out of Indian
+woods, he said.  But not let whites cut any.  So we say yes, and though
+full bloods are very mad when we cut down big trees, we do it.  For
+many moons we do it and in winter, white men haul it to sawmills.
+
+"Every little while, Levine comes up there and we have a council and
+tell him everything that happens.  All about things Marshall and other
+whites do.  And he pays us always.  Then he tells us that the Big
+Father will let mixed bloods sell their pine lands but not full bloods.
+So then we agree when he wants any full blood land to swear that any
+full blood is mixed.  And we have done this now, perhaps twenty times."
+
+The mixed blood and Charlie paused, and Levine leaned forward.
+"Crippled Bear," he said, "why did you tell all this?"
+
+Crippled Bear Jerked a swarthy thumb at Billy Norton.  "That white," he
+answered in English, "tell me if I tell truth, maybe I get back all
+lands and pine.  I like that, you un'stand--for then I sell 'em again,
+un'stand."
+
+A little ripple of laughter went through the room, though John himself
+did not smile.  He looked at young Norton with his black eyes half
+closed.
+
+Mr. Smith took up a paper.  "I have here, Mr. Levine, a statement of
+your dealings with the Lake City Lumber Company.  You have had sawed by
+them during the past six or eight years millions of feet of pine
+lumber.  I find that you are holding Indian lands in the name of Lydia
+Dudley and her father, Amos Dudley, these lands legally belonging to
+full bloods.  Amos Dudley is also the purchaser of land from full
+bloods, as is William Norton, Senior, through you."
+
+Levine rose quickly.  "Gentlemen," he exclaimed, "surely you can find
+enough counts against me without including Miss Dudley, who has never
+heard of the matters you mention."
+
+Commissioner James spoke for the first time.  "Suppose we go on with
+the witnesses before we open any discussion with Mr. Levine.  Jackson,
+what have these squaws to tell?  Or first, what about the other bucks?"
+
+When Charlie had called the last of these Levine spoke, "I'd like to
+call the Government Roll-maker, Mr. Hardy."
+
+A small man, who had slipped into the room unnoticed during the
+proceedings, came forward.
+
+"What is your business, Mr. Hardy?" asked Levine.
+
+"I am sent here by the Indian office to make a Roll of the Indians on
+this reservation, in the attempt to discover which are full and which
+mixed bloods."
+
+"Do you find your task difficult, Mr. Hardy?"  Levine's voice was
+whimsical.
+
+"Very!  The Government allows a man to claim his Indian rights when he
+has as little as one sixty-fourth of Indian blood in his veins.  On the
+other hand, the older Indians are deadly ashamed of white blood in
+their veins and hate to admit it."
+
+"Mr. Hardy, you have your Rolls with you?  Yes?  Well, tell me the
+blood status of each of these witnesses."
+
+The room was breathless while the little Roll-maker ran through his
+list.  According to this not one of the witnesses against Levine was a
+full blood nor one of the Indians from whom he had taken land.  Even
+old Susie and Charlie's sister, he stated, had white blood in their
+veins.
+
+"It's a lie!" shouted Charlie.  "This man Hardy is paid by Levine!"
+
+"Gently, Jackson!" said Senator James.  "Mr. Levine, do you wish to
+call more witnesses?"
+
+"Not for the present," replied John.  "Let Jackson go on."
+
+Charlie called old Susie.  And old Susie, waving aside any attempts on
+Charlie's part to help, told of the death of her daughter from
+starvation and cold, this same daughter having sold her pines to Levine
+for a five-dollar bill and a dollar watch.  She held out the watch
+toward Levine in one trembling old hand.
+
+"I find this in dress, when she dead.  She strong.  It take her many
+days to die.  I old.  I pray Great Spirit take me.  No!  I starve!  I
+freeze!  I no can die.  She young.  She have little baby.  She die."
+
+Suddenly, she flung the watch at Levine's feet and sank trembling into
+her chair.
+
+There was silence for a moment.  In at the open window came the rumble
+of a street-car.  Levine cleared his throat.
+
+"All this is dramatic, of course, but doesn't make me the murderer of
+the squaw."
+
+"No! but you killed my father!" shouted Charlie Jackson.  And rising,
+he hurled forth the story he had told Lydia, years before.  Lydia sat
+with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes fastened in horror
+on Charlie's face.  A great actor had been lost in creating Charlie an
+Indian.  He pictured his father's death, his sister's two attempts at
+revenge with a vividness and power that held even Levine spell-bound.
+It seemed to Lydia that the noose was fastened closer round John's neck
+with every word that was uttered.
+
+Suddenly she sprang to her feet.  "Stop, Charlie!  Stop!" she screamed.
+"You shan't say any more!"
+
+Senator Elway rapped on the table.  "You're out of order, Miss Dudley,"
+he exclaimed, sharply.
+
+Lydia had forgotten to be embarrassed.  "I can't help it if I am," she
+insisted, "I won't have Charlie Jackson picturing Mr. Levine as a
+fiend, while I have a tongue to speak with.  I know how bad the Indian
+matters are.  Nobody's worried about it more than I have.  But Mr.
+Levine's not a murderer.  He couldn't be."
+
+The three commissioners had looked up at Lydia with a scowl when she
+had interrupted Charlie.  Now the scowl, as they watched her flushed
+face, gave way to arched eyebrows and a little smile, that was
+reflected on every face in the room except Charlie Jackson's.
+
+"Lydia, you keep out of this," he shouted.  "You don't know what you're
+talking about."
+
+"I do too!" stormed Lydia.  "I--"
+
+"Order!  Let Jackson finish, Miss Dudley," said Senator Smith.
+
+"I can't let him finish," cried Lydia, "until I tell you about Mr.
+Levine.  He's been as much to me as my own father ever since my mother
+died when I was a little girl.  He's understood me as only my own
+mother could, hasn't he, Daddy!"
+
+Amos nodded, with a little apologetic glance at the commissioners.
+Levine's eyes were fastened on Lydia's face with an expression that was
+as sweet as it was fathomless.  Charlie Jackson stood biting his nails
+and waiting, his affection for Lydia holding in abeyance his frenzied
+loyalty to his father.
+
+"You think he could murder when he could hold a little girl on his
+knees and comfort her for the death of her little sister, when he
+taught her how to find God, when--oh, I know he's robbed the
+Indians--so has my own father, it seems, and so has Pa Norton, and so
+has Kent, and all of them are dear people.  They've all been wrong.
+But think of the temptation, Mr. Commissioner!  Supposing you were poor
+and the wonderful pines lay up there, _so easy to take_."
+
+Senator Elway would have interrupted, but Senator James laid a hand on
+his arm.  "It's all informal, let her have her say," he whispered.
+"It's the first bright spot in all the weeks of the hearing."
+
+"Did you ever feel land hunger yourself," Lydia went on eagerly, "to
+look at the rows and rows of pine and think what it would mean to own
+them, forever!  It's the queerest, strongest hunger in the world.  I
+know, because I've had it.  Honestly, I have, as strongly as any one
+here--only--I knew Charlie Jackson and this awful tragedy of his and I
+knew his eyes would haunt me if I took Indian lands."
+
+"You're covering a good deal of ground and getting away from the
+specific case, Miss Dudley," said, Smith.  "Of course, what you say
+doesn't exonerate Mr. Levine.  On the other hand, Jackson has no means
+of proving him accessory to the murder of his father.  We've threshed
+that out with Jackson before.  What you say of Mr. Levine's character
+is interesting but there remains the fact that he has been proceeding
+fraudulently for years in his relations to the Indian lands.  You
+yourself don't pretend to justify your acts, do you, Mr. Levine?"
+
+Lydia sat down and Levine slowly rose and looked thoughtfully out of
+the window.  "The legality or illegality of the matter has nothing to
+do with the broader ethics of the case, though I think you will find,
+gentlemen, that my acts are protected by law," he said.  "The virgin
+land lies there, inhabited by a degenerate race, whose one hope of
+salvation lay in amalgamation with the white race.  An ignorant
+government, when land was plenty and the tribe was larger, placed
+certain restrictions on the reservation.  When land became scarce, and
+the tribe dwindled to a handful, those restrictions became wrong.  It
+was inevitable that the whites should override them.  Knowing that the
+ethics of my acts and those of other people would be questioned, I went
+to Congress to get these restrictions removed.  If another two years
+could have elapsed, before these investigations had been begun, the
+fair name of Lake City never would have been smirched."  Levine's hand
+on the back of his chair tightened as he looked directly at Billy
+Norton.
+
+Once more Lydia came to her feet.  "Oh, Mr. Levine," she exclaimed,
+"don't put all the blame on Billy!  Really, it's my fault.  He wouldn't
+have done it if I hadn't agreed that it was right.  And he would have
+stopped when he found that Dad and his father had taken full blood
+lands only--why--why, I said that if I could stand his showing that you
+had been--crooked--up there, I could stand anything and I made him go
+on."
+
+She stopped with a little break in her voice that was not unlike a sob.
+And for the first time there spread over John Levine's face a blush, so
+dark, so agonizing, that the men about him turned their eyes away.
+With a little groan, he sat down.  Lydia clasped her hands.
+
+"Oh, it is all my fault," she repeated brokenly, "all the trouble
+that's come to Lake City."
+
+Billy Norton jumped up.  "That's blamed nonsense!" he began, when Smith
+interrupted him, impatiently.
+
+"Be seated, Norton."  Then, gently, to Lydia, "My dear, you mean that,
+knowing what an investigation would mean to the people you love, you
+backed young Norton in instigating one.  That you knew he would not go
+on without your backing?"
+
+"Yes, sir," faltered Lydia.
+
+"Can you tell us why?" asked Elway, still more gently.
+
+Lydia, whose cheeks were burning and whose eyes were deep with unshed
+tears, twisted her hands uncomfortably and looked at Billy.
+
+"Go ahead, Lyd," he said, reassuringly.
+
+"Because it was right," she said, finally.  "Because--Ducit Amor
+Patriae---you know, because no matter whether the Indians were good or
+bad, we had made promises to them and they depended on us."  She
+paused, struggling for words.
+
+"I did it because I felt responsible to the country like my ancestors
+did, in the Civil War and in the Revolution, to--to take care of
+America, to keep it clean, no matter how it hurt.  I--I couldn't be led
+by love of country and see my people doing something contemptible,
+something that the world would remember against us forever, and not try
+to stop it, no matter how it hurt."
+
+Trembling so that the ribbon at her throat quivered, she looked at the
+three commissioners, and sat down.
+
+James cleared his throat.  "Mr. Dudley, did you know your daughter's
+attitude when you undertook to get some pine lands?"
+
+Amos pulled himself to his feet.  His first anger at Lydia had given
+way to a mixture of feelings.  Now, he swallowed once or twice and
+answered, "Of course, I knew she was sympathetic with the Indians, but
+I don't know anything about the rest of it."
+
+The commissioners waited as though expecting Amos to go on.  He fumbled
+with his watch chain for a moment, staring out the window.  With his
+thin face, his high forehead and sparse hair, he never looked more like
+the picture of Daniel Webster than now.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "I'm a New Englander and I'm frank to admit that
+I've wandered a long way from the old ideals, like most of the New
+Englanders in America.  But that isn't saying, gentlemen, that I'm
+not--not darned proud of Lydia!"
+
+There was a little murmur through the room and Senator Elway smiled, a
+trifle sadly.  "Mr. Dudley," he said, "we're all proud of Lydia.  She's
+made our unsavory task seem better worth while."
+
+"I suggest that we adjourn for lunch," said Smith.  "Miss Dudley, you
+need not return."
+
+While her father paused to speak to Kent and Levine, Lydia made her
+escape.  She wanted more than anything in the world to be alone, but
+when she reached home, Ma Norton and Lizzie were waiting at the
+cottage, both of them half sick with anxiety.  They were not reassured
+by Lydia's story of the morning session, although Ma said,
+
+"Of course, it's the disgrace of the thing that worries us.  Pa and
+Billy say all this commission can do is to present their evidence to
+Congress.  I'm not saying, of course, that you weren't right plucky to
+take the stand you did, Lydia.  And I'm proud of Billy though he is
+bringing trouble on his poor father!"
+
+Lydia spent the afternoon with Adam in the woods.  She expected John
+Levine to come home with her father to supper, and for the first time
+in her life, she did not want to meet her best loved friend.  But she
+might have spared herself this anxiety, for Amos came home alone.
+Levine was busy, he said.
+
+Amos was in a curiously subdued mood.  Whatever Lydia had expected of
+him, she had not expected the almost conciliatory attitude he took
+toward her.  It embarrassed her far more than recriminations would have.
+
+"I do think, Lydia," he said mildly, after they had discussed the
+morning session, "you should have told me what was going on.  But
+there, I suppose, I'd have raised Cain, if you had."
+
+"Is Mr. Levine very angry with me?" asked Lydia.
+
+"He didn't say.  I don't see how he can be.  After all, the stuff was
+bound to come out, sooner or later.  He's got something up his sleeve.
+This experience's done one thing.  It's brought all the different
+factions together.  Disgrace loves company as well as misery."
+
+"I'm so worried about it all!" sighed Lydia.
+
+"Kind of late in the day for you to worry," sniffed Amos.  "I suppose
+Billy's worrying too!  But there, I guess you two have put some saving
+grace into Lake City, in the commission's eyes.  Of course, I'm going
+to give up any claim on those lands."
+
+Amos pulled at his pipe thoughtfully and looked at Lydia's tired,
+wistful face complacently.  He did not tell her that the three
+commissioners had individually and collectively congratulated him on
+Lydia and their praise had been such that he felt that any disgrace he
+had suffered in connection with the Indian lands had been more than
+counteracted by Lydia's performance.
+
+To Lydia's pain and disappointment, Levine did not come to the cottage
+before he returned to Washington, which he did the week following the
+hearing.  And then, all thought of her status with him was swallowed up
+in astonishment over the revelations that came out early in September
+when Dave Marshall and the Indian Agent were called before the
+commission.
+
+Dave Marshall was the owner of the Last Chance!  The Last Chance where
+"hussies" lay in wait like vultures for the Indian youths, took their
+government allowances, took their ancient Indian decency, and cast them
+forth to pollute their tribe with drink and disease.  The Last Chance!
+The headquarters for the illegal selling of whisky to Indians.  Where
+Indians were taught to evade the law, to carry whisky into the
+reservation and where in turn the bounty for their arrest was pledged
+to Marshall.  The Last Chance, the main source of Dave Marshall's
+wealth!
+
+Even Lake City was horrified by these revelations.  People began to
+remove their money from his bank and for a time a run was threatened,
+then Dave resigned as president and the run was stayed.  The drugstore
+owned by Dave was boycotted.  The women of the town began to cut
+Margery and Elviry.  The minister of the Methodist Church asked Dave
+for his resignation as Trustee.
+
+To say that old Lizzie was pleased by the revelations would be perhaps
+to do the old lady an injustice.  Yet the fact remains that she did go
+about with a knowing, "I told you so" air, that smacked of complacency.
+
+"He always was just _skulch_," she insisted to Lydia.  "When he was a
+child, he was the kind of a brat mothers didn't want their children to
+play with.  I always prayed he'd get his come-uppers, and Elviry too.
+But I am sorry for Margery.  Poor young one!  Her future's ruined."
+
+Lydia, sitting on the front steps in the lovely September afternoons,
+rubbed Adam's ears, watched the pine and the Norton herds and thought
+some long, long thoughts.  Finally, one hazy Saturday afternoon, she
+gathered a great bunch of many colored asters and started off, without
+telling Lizzie of her destination.
+
+It was nearly five o'clock when she stopped at the Marshalls' gate.
+The front of the house was closed, but nothing daunted, she made her
+way round to the kitchen door, which was open.  Elviry answered her rap.
+
+"Oh, it's Lydia," she said, brusquely.  "What do you want?"
+
+"I brought Marg some flowers," answered Lydia, awkwardly.
+
+Elviry hesitated.  "Margery's been having a headache and I don't know
+as she'd want to see you."
+
+Lydia was not entirely daunted.  "Well, if you're getting supper you
+might let me come and sit in the kitchen a few minutes.  It's quite a
+walk in from the cottage."
+
+Elviry opened the screen door and Lydia marched in and paused.  Dave
+Marshall was sitting by the kitchen table, his hat on the back of his
+head, a pile of newspapers on the floor beside him.  He did not speak
+to Lydia when she came in, but Lydia nodded brightly at him and said,
+"You like to sit in the kitchen, the way Dad does, don't you?"
+
+She sat down in the rocker by the dining-room door and Elviry began to
+stir a kettle of catsup that was simmering on the back of the stove.
+
+This was worse than Lydia had thought it would be.  She had not
+calculated on Dave's being at home.  However, her fighting blood was up.
+
+"You haven't asked me about my clothes, Mrs. Marshall," she said.
+"Don't you think I did pretty well with this skirt?"
+
+Elviry glanced at the blue serge skirt.  "It'll do," she answered
+listlessly.
+
+Lydia looked at Dave desperately.  At that moment there was a light
+step in the dining-room, and Margery came into the kitchen.  When she
+saw Lydia she gasped.
+
+"Hadn't you heard?  Oh, Lydia!  You came anyhow!" and suddenly Margery
+threw herself down and sobbed with her face in Lydia's lap.
+
+Elviry threw her apron over her head and Dave, with a groan, dropped
+his head on his chest.  For a moment, there was only the crackling of
+the fire in the stove and Margery's sobs to be heard.
+
+Then Dave said, "What did you come for, Lydia?  You only hurt yourself
+and you can't help us.  I don't know what to do!  God!  I don't know
+what to do!"
+
+"I don't see why everybody acts so," cried Elviry, "as if what you'd
+done was any worse than every one else's doings."
+
+Margery raised her head.  "Of course it's worse!  A thousand times
+worse!  I could have stood Dad's even having an Indian wife, better
+than this."
+
+Dave looked at Margery helplessly and his chin quivered.  Lydia noticed
+then how old he was looking.
+
+"I want Margery and her mother to pack up and go away--for good," said
+Dave to Lydia.  "I'll close up here and follow when I can.  None of
+these cases will ever come to anything in our state court.  It's the
+disgrace--and the way the women folks take it."
+
+"I--I've been thinking," said Lydia, timidly, "that what you ought to
+do--"
+
+Margery was sitting back on the floor now and she interrupted bitterly.
+"I don't see why you should try to help us, Lyd.  Mother's always
+treated you dirt mean."
+
+"It's not because of your mother," said Lydia, honestly.  "I couldn't
+even try to forgive her--but--your father did a great favor to me and
+once I promised him then to be his friend.  And you, Margery, you were
+fond of--of little Patience, and she did love you so!  If she'd lived,
+I know she'd have wanted me to stand by you."
+
+"She was a dear little kiddie," said Margery.  "I always meant to tell
+you how I cried when she died, and then somehow, you were so silent, I
+couldn't."
+
+The old lines round Lydia's mouth deepened for a minute, then she
+swallowed and said,
+
+"I don't think it would do a bit of good for you all to go away.  The
+story would follow you.  Mr. Marshall ought to sell out everything and
+buy a farm.  Let Mrs. Marshall go off for a visit, if she wants to, and
+let Margery come and stay with me a while and go to college."
+
+Dave raised his head.  "That's what I'd rather do, Lydia, for myself.
+Just stay here and try to live it down.  I'd like to farm it.  Always
+intended to."
+
+Margery wrung her hands.  "Oh, I don't see how I can!  If it had been
+anything, anything but the Last Chance.  Everybody will cut me and talk
+about me."
+
+"Oh, well, Margery," said Lydia, a little impatiently, "it's the first
+trouble you've had in all your life and it won't kill you.  Anybody
+that's as pretty as you are can live down anything.  I know our house
+is awful scrimpy, but we'd have some good times, anyhow.  Kent and
+Billy will stand by us and we'll pull through.  See if we don't."
+
+"I don't see why she needs to go to your house," said Elviry.  "Let her
+stay right here, and go up to college with you if she will.  And I
+don't want to go live on a farm, either."
+
+"Mother, you don't understand, yet!" exclaimed Margery.
+
+"Elviry," said Dave grimly, "our day is over.  All we can hope to save
+out of the wreck is a future for Margery.  Just get that through your
+head once and for all.  I think Lydia's idea is horse sense.  But it's
+for Margery to decide."
+
+Margery got up from her place on the floor.  "I thought we'd sell out
+and go to Europe for the rest of our lives," she said, "but as Lydia
+says, the story would follow us there.  Dad," sharply, "you aren't
+going to _sell_ the Last Chance and use that money?"
+
+"I closed it up, last week," said Dave shortly.  "I'm going to have the
+place torn down."
+
+Margery rubbed her hand over her forehead.  "Well," she said, "I don't
+see that I'd gain anything but a reputation for being a quitter, if I
+went to Lydia's.  I'll stay with you folks, but I'll go to college, if
+Lydia'll stand by me."
+
+Lydia rose.  "Then that's settled.  On Monday we'll register.  I'll
+meet you on the eight o'clock car."
+
+"I can't thank you, Lyd,--" began Margery.
+
+"I don't want any thanks," said Lydia, making for the door, where Dave
+intercepted her with outstretched hand.
+
+Lydia looked up into his dark face and her own turned crimson.  "I
+can't shake hands," she said, "honestly, I can't.  The Last Chance and
+the--the starving squaws make me sick.  I'll stand by Margery and help
+you--but I can't do that."
+
+Dave Marshall dropped his hand and turned away without a word and Lydia
+sped from the house into the sunset.
+
+Amos heard Lydia's story of her call with a none too pleased face.  "I
+don't think I want you mixing up with them, in any way," he said.
+
+"But let me help Margery," pleaded Lydia, "Little Patience did love her
+so!"
+
+"Well--Margery--you can help her," he agreed, reluctantly, "but you
+can't go near their house again.  Margery will have to do all the
+visiting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE MILITARY HOP
+
+
+"Who shall say that I do not understand what the wind sings in my
+branches or that I am less than the white or more than the
+Indian?"--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+In spite of the fact that Levine had avoided her, after the hearing,
+and in spite of all the many half tragic ramifications of the
+reservation trouble, Lydia was not unhappy.  In fact, when Registration
+day dawned she awoke with a sense of something good impending, sang as
+she dressed, and piloted Margery gaily through the complications of
+entering the University as a "special" student.
+
+Margery, for the first month or so, was silent and kept as close as
+possible to Lydia's apron strings.  But Lydia had prophesied truly.  No
+girl as beautiful as Margery could be kept in Coventry long and though
+she refused for a time to go to parties, it was not long before Margery
+was taking tramps with the college boys and joining happily enough in
+the simple pleasures at the cottage.
+
+Lydia did not hear from Kent until a week before the first college hop,
+late in October.  Then she received a formal note from him, reminding
+her of his invitation.
+
+"Oh, Lyd!" exclaimed Margery, "aren't you lucky!  I haven't seen Kent
+or heard from him since our trouble!"
+
+"Neither have I," said Lydia.  "And I suspect he's so cross with me
+that he hates to keep this engagement.  But I don't care.  I wish I had
+a new dress.  But I've made the sleeves small in my organdy and made a
+new girdle.  It looks as well as could be expected!" she finished,
+comically.
+
+"Lydia," cried Margery, suddenly, "I've a whole closet full of party
+dresses I won't wear this year and you and I are just of a size, won't
+you wear one--take one and keep it--please, Lydia!"
+
+Lydia flushed and shook her head.
+
+"Is it because they were bought with Dad's money?" asked Margery.
+
+Lydia's flush grew deeper.  "I couldn't take it anyway, Margery," she
+protested.  But Margery tossed her head and was silent for the rest of
+the afternoon.
+
+The hop was a success, a decided success, in spite of the organdy.
+Kent was inclined to be stiff, at first, and to wear a slightly injured
+air, and yet, mingled with this was a frank and youthful bravado.  And
+there could be no doubt that among the college boys, Kent was more or
+less of a hero.  It was something to boast of, evidently, to have one's
+name coupled with Levine's in the great scandal.
+
+Kent had supposed that he would have some trouble in filling Lydia's
+card for her, but to his surprise, he found that in her timid way,
+Lydia was something of a personage among the older college boys and the
+younger professors.
+
+"Oh, you have Miss Dudley.  Let me have three dances, will you," said
+the instructor in Psychology.  "How pretty she is to-night!"
+
+"Lydia is a peach," Kent stated briefly.  "One two-step is the best I
+can do for you."
+
+"Come now, Moulton, a two-step and a waltz," said Professor Willis.  "I
+haven't seen Miss Dudley since college opened.  Isn't her hair
+wonderful to-night!"
+
+Gustus was there with Olga.  "Gimme a waltz with Lydia, Kent," he
+demanded.  "Who'd ever thought she'd grow up so pretty!  If she could
+dress well--"
+
+"Her card's full," grunted Kent.  "And she dresses better'n any girl I
+know.  What's the matter with that dress?"
+
+The two young men stood watching Lydia, who was chatting with Professor
+Willis.  The dress was out of style.  Even their masculine eyes
+recognized that fact, yet where in the room was there a mass of dusty
+gold hair like Lydia's, where such scarlet cheeks, where such a look of
+untried youth?
+
+"Oh, well, it was just something Olga said," began Gustus.
+
+"Olga makes me sick," said Kent, and he stalked over to claim a waltz
+with Lydia.
+
+It was altogether an intoxicating evening and at its end Lydia pulled
+on her last winter's overcoat and clambered into Kent's little
+automobile, utterly satisfied with life.
+
+"Well, did I give you a good time, Miss?" asked Kent, as they
+chug-chugged down the Avenue.
+
+"Oh, Kent, it was wonderful!"
+
+"And you don't feel as if I were a villain any more?  You've forgiven
+me?"
+
+"Forgiven you?  For what?"
+
+"For not agreeing with you on the Indian question.  Gee, I was sore at
+you, Lyd, that morning at the hearing, and yet I was like your Dad.  I
+was proud of you, too."
+
+"Oh, don't let's talk about it, to-night, Kent," Lydia protested.
+
+"All right, old girl, only just remember that I can't change.  I back
+Mr. Levine to the limit.  And maybe he hasn't a surprise party coming
+for all of you!"
+
+"I don't care," insisted Lydia.  "I'm going to be happy to-night, and I
+won't talk Indians.  Oh, Kent, isn't Gustus getting good-looking?"
+
+"Too fat," replied Kent.  "He drinks too much beer.  And let me call
+your attention to something funny.  As you know, he's always had
+trouble getting in with the college set, because of the brewery.  But
+his father is the only well-to-do man in town who's had nothing to do
+with the reservation, so now, by contrast, brewing becomes a highly
+honorable business!  And Gustus goes with 'our very best families.'"
+
+Lydia chuckled, then said, "Margery is feeling much better.  She's at
+our house every Sunday.  You must come round and see her!"
+
+"Why shouldn't I come to see you, Lydia?" asked Kent, with a new note
+in his voice.
+
+"Why, of course, you'd see me, but Margery's always been the main
+attraction with you."
+
+"Has she?  Seems to me I recall a time when I couldn't endure the sight
+of her.  And when you were the best pal I had.  That's what you are,
+Lydia, a real pal.  A fellow can flirt round with the rest of 'em, but
+you're the one to look forward to spending a lifetime with!"
+
+Lydia drew a quick breath, then laughed a little uncertainly.  "You
+were the dearest boy!  Do you remember how you hated to wash your hands
+and that funny cotton cap you liked to wear with Goldenrod Flour
+printed across it?"
+
+"Of course, I remember.  And I remember how the fellows used to tease
+me about you.  I licked Gustus twice for it, when we were in the ward
+schools.  Lydia, let's go over those old trails together again.
+To-morrow's Sunday.  Let's take a walk down to the Willows in the
+afternoon."
+
+"All right, Kent," said Lydia, quietly, and silence fell on both of
+them till they drew up at the cottage gate.
+
+Kent lifted Lydia to the ground, held both of her hands, started to
+speak, then with a half inarticulate, "Thank you, Lydia, and good-by
+till to-morrow," he jumped into the little car and was gone.
+
+For some reason, when she woke the next morning, Lydia half hoped that
+the soft patter against her window was of rain drops.  But it was the
+wind-tossed maple leaves, whose scarlet and gold were drifting deep on
+the lawn and garden.  There never was a more brilliant October day than
+this, and at three o'clock, Lydia and Kent set off down the road to the
+Willows.
+
+Lizzie watched them from the living-room window.  "They're a handsome
+pair, Amos," she said.  "Now aren't they?"
+
+Amos looked up from his Sunday paper with a start.  "Those young ones
+aren't getting sentimental, are they, Liz?" he asked, sharply.
+
+"Well," returned Lizzie, "they might be, very naturally, seeing they're
+both young and good-looking.  For the land sake!  Don't you expect
+Lydia to find her young man and settle down?"
+
+"No, I don't!" snapped Amos.  "There isn't a man on earth good enough
+for Lydia.  I don't want her to marry.  I'll take care of her."
+
+"Humph!  Nothing selfish about a man, is there?" muttered Lizzie.
+
+Kent and Lydia strolled along the leafy road, with the tang of the
+autumn in their nostrils, and the blue gleam of the lake in their eyes.
+It was only a half mile to the Willows and as they turned in, Kent took
+Lydia's hand and drew it through his arm.
+
+"Look," he said, "I believe there is even a little left of our cave,
+after all this time.  What a rough little devil I was in those days.
+And yet, even then, Lyd, I believe I had an idea of trying to take care
+of you."
+
+"You were not a rough little devil!" exclaimed Lydia, indignantly.
+"You were a dear!  I can never forget what you did for me, when little
+Patience died."
+
+"I was a selfish brute in lots of ways afterward, though," said Kent,
+moodily.  "I didn't have sense enough to appreciate you, to
+realize--yet, I did in a way.  Remember our talks up at camp?  Then, of
+course, we never shall agree on the Indian question.  But what does
+that amount to?"
+
+Kent dropped Lydia's hand and faced her.  "Lydia, do you care for
+me--care for me enough to marry me?"
+
+Lydia turned pale.  Something in her heart began to sing.  Something in
+her brain began to stir, uncomfortably.
+
+"Oh, Kent," she began, breathlessly, then paused and the two looked
+deep into each other's eyes.
+
+"Lydia!  Lydia!!  I need you so!" cried Kent.  "You are such a dear,
+such a pal, so pretty, so sweet--and I need you so!  Won't you marry
+me, Lydia?"
+
+He seized both her hands and held them against his cheeks.
+
+"I've always loved you dearly, Kent, and yet," faltered Lydia, "and
+yet, somehow, I don't think we'd ever make each other happy."
+
+"Not make each other happy!  I'd like to know why not!  Just try me,
+Lydia!  Try me!"
+
+Kent's charming face was glowing.  Into Lydia's contralto voice crept
+the note that had belonged to little Patience's day.
+
+"I'd like to try you, dear if----  Wait, Kent, wait!  Let me have my
+playtime, Kent.  I've never had a real one, you know, till now.  Let me
+finish college, then ask me again, will you, Kent?"
+
+Kent jerked his head discontentedly.  "I think it would be better for
+us to tie to each other right now.  Please, Lydia dear!"
+
+Lydia shook her head slowly.  "Let me have my playtime, Kent.  I don't
+know that side of myself at all."
+
+Kent looked at the lake and at the little cave of long ago and back
+into the clear tender blue of Lydia's eyes.  Then he said softly, "All
+right, dear!  You know best.  But will you give me just one kiss,--for
+remembrance?"
+
+"Yes," replied Lydia, lifting her face, and Kent pulled off his cap and
+kissed the warm, girlish lips, tenderly, lingeringly, then, without a
+word, gently turned Lydia homeward.
+
+Kent's announcement that he had broken with Billy Norton did not amount
+to a great deal.  As winter came on, he and Billy met constantly at the
+cottage and outwardly at least, were friendly.  The commission finished
+its sitting and turned its findings over to Congress.  Congress
+instructed the District Attorney to carry the matter to the state
+courts.  When this had been done all the incriminated heaved a vast
+sigh of relief, and prepared to mark time.
+
+To tell the truth, Lydia was not giving a great deal of thought to
+weighty problems, this winter.  No girl who finds herself with two
+young men in love with her, can give much thought to the world outside
+her own.  Nor did the fact that Professor Willis made a point of
+appearing at the cottage at least once a month detract any from her
+general joy in life.
+
+She was doing well in her studies, though outside of the occasional hop
+she attended with Billy or Kent, she had no part in the college social
+life.  She was not altogether contented with the thought of preparing
+herself to teach.  The idea gave her no mental satisfaction.  She could
+not bring herself to believe that her real talents lay in that
+direction.  Yet, though this dissatisfaction grew as the days went on,
+it did not prevent her from taking a keen pleasure in the books she
+read and studied.
+
+She suddenly grew ashamed of her old E. P. Roe period and developed a
+great avidity for Kipling and Thomas Hardy, for Wordsworth and Stephen
+Phillips.  To her surprise she found that Billy was more familiar with
+these writers than she.  Kent read newspapers and nothing else.
+
+During all Lydia's Junior year, but one fly appeared in her ointment.
+And this, of course, was with, reference to clothes! that perennial
+haunting problem of Lydia's, which only a woman who has been motherless
+and poverty-stricken and pretty can fully appreciate.  The latter part
+of February, the great college social event of the year was to come,
+the Junior Prom.  Lydia felt sure that either Kent or Billy would ask
+her to go and for this the organdy would not do.  And for this she must
+have a party coat.
+
+Lydia knew if she took the matter up with Amos he would go out and
+borrow money for her.  She shuddered at the thought of this.  He had
+been so bitter about her fudge selling that she dared not broach the
+matter of money earning to him again.  Then she heard of the College
+Money Making Bureau.  She discovered that there were girls who were
+earning their way through college and that the Bureau was one of the
+quiet ways used by the University to help them.
+
+There was the Mending Department for example.  Here were brought every
+week by the well-to-do students piles of mending of every variety from
+heelless socks and stockings, to threadbare underwear and frayed cuffs
+and collars.  These were made into packages and farmed out to the money
+needing girls.  The Department was located in a room in the rear of the
+Chemical laboratory, and was in charge of the old janitor, whose casual
+manner was a balm to the pride of the most sensitive.
+
+Early in January, Lydia sneaked into the little room, and out again
+with a neat but heavy bundle.  She got home with it and smuggled it
+into her room without old Lizzie's seeing it.  Socks, wristbands and
+torn lace--there was fifty cents' worth of mending in the package!
+Lydia calculated that if she did a package a night for thirty nights,
+she would have enough money to buy the making of the party dress and
+cloak.
+
+The necessity for secrecy was what made the task arduous.  Lydia
+finished her studying as hurriedly as possible each night and went on
+to her room.  It was bitter cold in the room when the door was closed,
+but she hung a dust cloth over the keyhole, a shawl over the window
+shade, wrapped herself in a quilt and unwrapped the bundle.  By two
+o'clock she had finished and shivering and with aching eyes, crept into
+bed.
+
+Within a week she was going about her daily work with hollow eyes and
+without the usual glow in her cheeks.  Within two weeks, the casual
+glimpse of Lizzie darning one of Amos' socks gave her a sense of
+nausea, but she hung on with determination worthy of a better cause.
+
+The third week she took cold, an almost unheard-of proceeding for
+Lydia, and in spite of all old Lizzie's decoctions, she could not throw
+it off.  Amos insisted that Lizzie see her to bed each night with hot
+lemonade and hot water bottle.  Lydia protested miserably until she
+found that it was really more comfortable to mend in bed than it was to
+sit quilt-wrapped in a chair.  At the end of the fourth week she
+carried back her last bundle, and with fifteen dollars in her
+pocketbook, she boarded the street-car for home.  She was trembling
+with fatigue and fever.
+
+When she reached the cottage, she stretched out on the couch behind the
+old base burner with her sense of satisfaction dulled by her hard cough
+and the feverish taste in her mouth.  She was half asleep, half in a
+stupor when Billy came in.
+
+"How's the cold, Lyd?" he asked.
+
+"I got it," she murmured hoarsely.  "It'll be white mull and pink
+eider-down."
+
+"What did you say?" asked Billy, coming over to the couch and peering
+down at her, through the dusk.
+
+"Socks," whispered Lydia, "bushels of socks, aren't there, Billy?"
+
+Billy picked up her hand and felt her pulse, pulled the shawl up over
+her chest, put his cheek down against her forehead for a moment as he
+murmured, "Oh, Lydia, don't be sick!  I couldn't bear it!" then he
+hurried to the kitchen where Lizzie was getting supper.
+
+The next thing that Lydia knew she was in her own bed and "Doc" Fulton
+was taking the clinical thermometer from her mouth.  She was very much
+confused.
+
+"Where's my fifteen dollars?" she asked.
+
+"What fifteen dollars, little daughter?"  Amos was sitting on the edge
+of the bed, holding her hand.
+
+"For my party dress--white mull--with socks--please, Daddy."
+
+Amos looked at Lizzie.  "It's what she wanted for the Junior Prom, I
+guess," said the old lady, "poor child."
+
+"You shall have fifteen dollars, just as soon as you get well, honey,"
+said Amos.
+
+"All right," said Lydia, hoarsely, "tell Kent so's he--"  She trailed
+off again into stupor.
+
+It was a hard pull, a sharp, hard struggle with badly congested lungs,
+for two weeks.  It was the first real illness Lydia had had in all her
+sturdy young life.  Ma Norton took charge and "Doc" Fulton was there
+night after night.  Margery came every day, with a basket, for Elviry
+practically fed Amos during the two weeks.  Billy did chores.  Kent was
+errand boy with the little car.  And Adam sat on the doorstep for hours
+and howled!
+
+And all this time Lydia wandered in a world of her own, a world that
+those about her were utterly unable to picture through the erratic
+fragments of talk she uttered from time to time.  She talked to them of
+little Patience, of John Levine, of old Susie, She seemed to be blaming
+herself for the starving of an Indian baby who was confused in her mind
+with little Patience.  She sought her fifteen dollars through wild
+vicissitudes, until Amos found the little purse under the couch pillow
+and, wondering over its contents, put it in Lydia's feverish hands.
+Thereafter she talked of it no more.
+
+But Lydia was splendidly strong.  One night, after ten days of stupor
+and delirium, she opened her eyes on Amos' haggard face.  She spoke
+weakly but naturally.  "Hello, Dad!  Ask Margery to get me the pattern
+we were talking about.  In a day or so I'll be up and around."
+
+Amos began to cry for sheer joy.
+
+Once she began to mend, Lydia's recovery was unbelievably rapid.  On a
+Sunday, a week before the Junior Prom., she was able to dress and to
+lie on the living-room couch.  During the afternoon, Kent came in.  He
+had had one or two glimpses of the invalid before, but this was the
+first opportunity he'd had for a chat.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!" he cried.  "Are you going to go to the Junior Prom. with
+me, after all?"
+
+"Kent, I can't go.  I might be strong enough for one or two dances by
+that time, but I can't get my clothes done."
+
+"Pshaw, isn't that hard luck!" Kent's voice was soft with sympathy.
+"Never mind, old lady!  I'm so darned glad to have you getting well so
+fast, that the Prom. doesn't matter.  Say, Lyd, Margery's come out
+fine, since you've been sick!"
+
+"I know it," said Lydia.  "Just think of Margery carrying Dad's meals
+in a basket, and helping Lizzie with the dishes.  And I know she hates
+it worse than poison.  She's out in the kitchen now, making fudge."
+
+Kent brightened, perceptibly.  "Is she?  Er--Lydia, don't you think
+she'd go to the Prom. with me?  Seems to me she's cut out society as
+long as she needs to."
+
+Lydia buried her nose in a bunch of violets that Professor Willis had
+sent her.  "I think she ought to go if she wants to," she said.
+
+"Guess I'll ask her now," cried Kent, disappearing kitchenward.
+
+Lydia lay watching snowflakes sift softly past the window.  It was not
+long before Margery and Kent appeared.
+
+"She's going!" cried Kent.
+
+Margery's beautiful eyes were glowing.  "Yes, I'm going, Lyd!  And if
+nobody else will dance with me, Kent will take all the dances."
+
+Old Lizzie followed in.  She looked sharply at Lydia, then said, "You
+folks come out in the dining-room and let Lydia have a little nap."
+
+"No, I guess I'll go home," Margery answered, "Mother's not very well
+to-day."
+
+"I'll take you along in my chug-chug."  Kent crossed over to the couch
+and took Lydia's hand, while Margery went for her wraps.  "Good-by,
+dear," he whispered, "get well fast for me."
+
+Lydia smiled at him over the bunch of violets.
+
+Billy was the next caller.  "I left Dad and Amos saving the Nation
+through Free Trade," he said.  "Gee, Lydia, but you do look better!
+You don't suppose you could possibly go to the Prom., just for one or
+two dances, do you?"
+
+Lydia shook her head.  "No clothes," she said, briefly.  "Ask some
+other girl."
+
+"There isn't any other girl," replied Billy.  "If I can't go with you,
+I'll be hanged if I go at all!  Lydia, I don't see why a sensible girl
+like you lays such stress on clothes.  Honestly, it's not like you.
+Come on, be a sport and go in your usual dress."
+
+Lydia looked at Billy's steady gray eyes, and a faint glow of comfort
+began to surround her heart.  Sometimes she felt as if Billy understood
+her almost as well as John Levine did.
+
+"Now, look here," he said, argumentatively, "you and I had better talk
+this clothes question out, once and for all."
+
+Lydia giggled.  "Billy, you don't know women!  It can't be talked out!"
+
+"I know you," replied the young man, stretching out his long legs to
+the base-burner, and looking at Lydia, "and I want you to stop worrying
+about your duds.  I want you to let me lend you the money to get a
+complete party outfit with."
+
+"Billy Norton, you know I wouldn't borrow money from a man!" exclaimed
+Lydia.
+
+"Well, then, I'll give it to Mother and you borrow it from her."
+
+"Of course, I won't," replied Lydia.  "Besides, I've got enough money I
+earned myself!"
+
+"You have!  Then what's all the worry about?  How'd you earn it, Lyd?
+I thought your father--"
+
+Lydia dug the little pocketbook from under the sofa pillow and spread
+the money proudly on her shawl.  "There it is and it's the root of all
+my troubles."
+
+Billy looked at her suspiciously.  "Young woman, how'd you earn that
+money?" he demanded.
+
+"Socks!  Bushels of socks, mostly," answered Lydia with a chuckle that
+ended in a groan.  She looked at Billy whimsically and then as the
+sureness of his understanding came to her again, she told him the story
+of her little midnight sweatshop.
+
+"Oh, dearest!" Billy burst forth with a groan when she had finished,
+"how could you be such a little idiot!  Oh, Lydia, Lydia, I can't tell
+you how you wring my heart."
+
+It seemed for a moment as if he must gather the slight little figure to
+his heart, but he set his teeth.
+
+"If that darned Prom. means as much as that to you--" he began, but
+Lydia interrupted him.
+
+"It doesn't any more, Billy.  I've learned a lot of things since I've
+been sick.  I was a little idiot to work so hard for clothes!  But I
+don't think it was all clothes.  I wanted to be like other girls.  I
+wanted to have the man that took me proud of my appearance."
+
+She paused and Billy would have spoken, but Lydia began again.
+
+"You see, I was never sick before, so I never realized that a sickness
+is a serious thing in more ways than one.  I mean you can't go down to
+death's door and ever be quite the same afterward.  I've been thinking
+about myself a great deal.  Billy, and I'm feeling pretty small.  Isn't
+it queer how hard it is to learn just the simplest things about living!
+Seems as though I learn everything with my elbows."
+
+The two young people sat in silence, Lydia watching the snowflakes
+settle on the already overladen boughs of the pine.  Billy watching the
+sensitive lines in Lydia's face change with each passing thought.
+
+"I've made up my mind," Lydia began again, "that I've been poor too
+long, ever really to outgrow the effects of poverty.  I suppose I'd
+always worry about money, even if I were taken suddenly rich!  Anyhow,
+lots of nice people have liked me poor and I'm just not going to worry
+about having lovely clothes, with soft colors and--and graceful lines,
+any more.  I'm going to take care of our lovely old mahogany furniture
+and try to make the cottage an attractive place for people with brains.
+After all, the real thinkers of the country were poor--Emerson and his
+circle, how simply they lived!  You see, Billy, if I clutter up my mind
+with furniture and clothes, I won't have time to think."
+
+Lizzie came in at this moment with a bowl of broth.  "I'll hold it for
+you, Lydia," said Billy.  "Never mind pulling the little table up,
+Lizzie, she's too weak to fuss with a table."
+
+There was a remote twinkle in Lizzie's old eyes, but she gave the bowl
+over to Billy, and tactfully withdrew to the kitchen, where she sat
+down with her feet in the oven.  "Drat Kent!" she said to herself.
+
+Billy moved over to sit on the edge of the couch, and Lydia began to
+sip the broth, spoonful by spoonful.  "It's such fun to be weak and a
+little helpless and have people waiting on you," she said.  "It's the
+first time it ever happened to me."
+
+As she spoke she was thinking how Billy had improved.  How immaculate
+he was and how well his blue suit fitted him.  There was no barnyard
+odor about him now!  Only a whiff of the good cigars he smoked.
+
+"Billy," she said, "what would you say if next year I took the short
+course in agriculture?"
+
+Billy almost dropped the bowl.  "I'd be speechless!" he exclaimed.
+
+"I hate to think of teaching," Lydia went on, "and I'm crazy about the
+country and farming and so is Dad.  And there's more than that to it."
+
+What more there was to it, she did not say then, for Ma Norton came
+bustling in.  She made no comment on Billy's posing as a table!  Ma was
+wise and she was almost as devoted to Lydia as Billy himself.
+
+"It's nice to see the pink coming back in your cheeks, Lydia," she
+said.  "I just ran over to say I was going into town to do some
+shopping, early in the morning, and if there was anything I could do
+for you--?"
+
+"No, thank you," said Lydia.  "I've begun to save up now to buy a cow!"
+
+And Ma looked on with a puzzled smile as Lydia and Billy burst into
+sudden shrieks of laughter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE END OF A GREAT SEARCH
+
+
+"Abiding love!  Those humans who know it, become an essential part of
+nature's scheme."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia returned to her college work the Monday after the Junior Prom, a
+little thinner, and her color not quite so bright as usual, but in a
+most cheerful frame of mind.  She was feeling, somehow, a new sense of
+maturity and contentment.  Even tales of the wonders of the Prom did
+not disturb her much.  She made up her lost classroom work, then took
+on an extra course in English Essayists with Professor Willis, just to
+satisfy her general sense of superiority to the ordinary temptations
+that should have disturbed a young female with fifteen idle dollars in
+her pocket!
+
+Kent was devoting a good deal of attention to Lydia but this did not
+prevent his taking Margery about.  He was, he explained to Lydia, so
+sorry for her!
+
+"You don't have to explain to me," protested Lydia.  "I want you to go
+with all the girls you like.  I intend to see all I want of as many men
+as care to see me.  I told you this was my playtime."
+
+Kent's reply to this was a non-committal grunt.
+
+It was late in May that he told Lydia what John Levine had finally
+accomplished, in his silent months of work in Washington.  The morning
+after he told Lydia, Lake City was ringing with the news.  The Indians
+on the reservation were to be removed bodily to a reservation in the
+Southwest.  The reservation was then to be thrown open to white
+settlement.
+
+"What will poor Charlie Jackson say?" were Lydia's first words.
+
+Kent shrugged his shoulders.  "Poor old scout!  He'll have to make a
+new start in the West.  But isn't it glorious news, Lyd!  The land
+reverts to the Government and the Land Office opens it, just as in
+pioneer days.  Everybody who's title's in question now can reenter
+under settlement laws.  Isn't Levine a wizard!  Why don't you say
+something, Lydia?"
+
+"I don't know what to say," said Lydia.  "I'm sick at heart for the
+Indians.  But I'm glad that the awful temptation of the pines is going
+to be taken away from Lake City.  Though how good can come out of a
+wrong, I'm not sure.  I don't understand Mr. Levine.  Oh, dear!  It's
+all wrong.  When do the Indians go?"
+
+"The last of June.  It's funny, Lydia, that you don't have more
+sympathy with my work," replied Kent, gloomily.
+
+"Oh, Kent!" cried Lydia, "I want to believe that everything you do is
+right but something's the matter with my mind, I seem to have to decide
+matters of right and wrong for myself.  When will Mr. Levine come home?"
+
+"Next month.  Well, there's one consolation.  You've always been crazy
+about Levine and you don't approve of him, either."
+
+Lydia flushed.  "Oh, I don't say that I don't approve of him.  I just
+don't understand him.  Maybe he really believes the end justifies the
+means."
+
+"Huh!  Isn't that just what I believe?" demanded Kent.  He looked at
+her so happily, his boyish eyes so appealing, his square chin so
+belligerent, that Lydia suddenly laughed and gave his ear a tweak.
+
+"Poor old vanity!  Did he want all the ladies to adore him?  Well, they
+do, so cheer up!"
+
+Kent grinned.  "Lyd, you're a goose and a good old pal!  Hang it, I'm
+glad you've got brain enough to stick to your own opinions!"
+
+On a Sunday afternoon, late in June, John Levine turned in at the gate
+as casually as though he had left but the day before.  Lydia was
+inspecting the garden with her father, when she heard Adam bark and
+whine a welcome to some one.
+
+"Oh, there he is, Daddy!" she cried, and she dashed down the rows of
+young peas, her white skirts fluttering, both hands extended.
+
+John seized her hands and for a moment the two stood smiling and
+looking into each other's face.  Except that he was grayer, Levine was
+unchanged.  He broke the silence to say, "Well!  Well! young Lydia, you
+are grown up.  I don't see how you manage to look so grown up, when
+your face remains unchanged."
+
+"It's my hair," said Lydia, "and my skirts."
+
+"Of course," growled Amos, "I realize that I count only as Lydia's
+father.  Still I think you ought to recognize me, anyhow."
+
+The two men clasped hands.  "Well, Amos?"
+
+"It's been a long time between drinks, John."
+
+"I know it, Amos, but my chore's done.  Now, I'll stay home and enjoy
+life.  Lydia, is it too hot for waffles and coffee, for supper?  Lord,
+I've dreamed of those old days and of this meeting for nine months."
+
+"It's not too hot for anything on earth you can ask for," returned
+Lydia, beginning to roll up her sleeves.  "I'll go right in and start
+them now."
+
+John looked after her, at the lengthened skirts, at the gold braids
+wrapped round her head.  "She doesn't change except in size, thank
+God," he said.
+
+"Oh, she gets prettier," said Amos, carelessly.  "She's sort of grown
+up to her mouth, and the way she wears her hair shows the fine set of
+her head.  She's improved a lot."
+
+"She has _not_!  Amos, you never did appreciate her.  She couldn't be
+any more charming now than she was as a kiddie."
+
+Amos put an affectionate hand on his friend's shoulder.  "You always
+were an old fool, John.  Come up and peel your coat, then take a look
+at the garden.  There's Lizzie, dying to speak to you."
+
+Levine looked around the living-room, complacently.  "Jove, isn't it
+fine!  Most homelike place in America.  Lydia's been fixing up the old
+mahogany, eh?"
+
+"Yes!  One of the professors told her it was O. K., so she got a book
+out of the library on old furniture and now we are contented and
+strictly up to date.  These damned rugs though, I can't get her to tack
+'em down.  They're just like so many rags on the floor!  I never had a
+chance to tell you what she did to my mahogany arm chair, did I?"
+
+He retailed the story of Willis' first call and John roared though he
+murmured, "Poor kiddie," as he did so.
+
+"She's given me over to my sins, though, lately," Amos went on, with
+the faint twinkle in his eyes that Lydia had inherited.  "She brought
+me up by hand, for a long time, hid my pipes, wanted me to manicure my
+nails, wouldn't let me eat in my shirt sleeves or drink my coffee out
+of the saucer.  But her friend, Willis, likes me, as is,--so she's let
+me backslide without a murmur."
+
+Amos paused and looked out at the shimmering lake.  "John, I wish I had
+five daughters.  There's nothing like 'em in the world."
+
+Levine did not answer for a moment, while his gaze followed Amos' out
+over the familiar outline of blue water and far green hills.
+
+"Sometimes, Amos," he muttered, finally, "I feel as if my whole life
+had been wasted."
+
+It was an extraordinarily pleasant supper.  John and Amos, in their
+shirt sleeves, ate waffles till Lydia declared that both the batter and
+her strength were exhausted.  Indians were not mentioned.  Levine was
+in a reminiscent mood and told stories of his boyhood on a Northern
+Vermont farm and old Lizzie for the first time in Lydia's remembrance
+told of some of the beaux she had had when her father was the richest
+farmer round Lake City.
+
+After the dishes were washed, Levine asked Lydia to stroll up the road
+with him while Amos did his evening chores.  It was dusk when they
+turned out the gate to the road, Lydia clinging to John's arm.  A June
+dusk, with the fresh smell of the lake mingling with the heavy scent of
+syringa and alder bloom, and of all the world of leafage at the high
+tide of freshness.  June dusk, with the steady croak of frogs from the
+meadows and the faint call of whippoorwills from the woods.
+
+John put a long, hard hand over the small thin one on his arm.  "Have
+you missed me, young Lydia?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she answered, "especially as you never came near us after the
+hearing."
+
+"How could I come?" asked the man, simply.  "You had weighed me and
+found me wanting.  There was nothing for me to do but to go ahead and
+finish my job, as I still saw the right of it.  Have you forgiven me,
+Lydia?"
+
+"It wasn't a matter between you and me," replied the girl, slowly.  "It
+was between you and your conscience and if your conscience approves,
+what's the use of asking me to forgive you?"
+
+"Because, I can't stand not having your approval," said Levine.
+
+They strolled on in silence, while Lydia considered her reply.  "No
+matter if the destroying of the Indians were right, that wouldn't
+exonerate the whites for having been cruel and crooked in doing it.
+People will always remember it of us."
+
+Levine gave a laugh that had no mirth in it.  "Lord, who'll say the New
+England spirit is dead!  You're as cold in judging me as one of your
+ancestors was when he sentenced a witch to be burned."
+
+"Oh, no!" cried Lydia.  "Dear John Levine, I couldn't be cold to you.
+Nothing could make me love you less.  And you yourself told me to be
+true to myself."
+
+John sighed, then said abruptly, "Let's never discuss it again.  What
+are you reading now, Lydia?"
+
+"English essayists and Emerson.  I'm crazy about Emerson.  He seems so
+much more human than Leigh Hunt and De Quincey and the rest of them.
+Maybe it's because he's an American, so I understand him better.  I
+think I like Compensation and Friendship the best so far.  I learned
+one thing from Friendship to quote to you.  It's like you and me."
+
+With both hands clasping his arm, her sweet face upturned to his in the
+dusk, and with the rich notes in her voice that were reminiscent of
+little Patience, she quoted:
+
+"'Friendship--that select and sacred relationship that is a kind of
+absolute and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and
+common so much is this purer; and nothing is so much divine.'"
+
+John stopped and taking Lydia's face in both his hands, he exclaimed
+huskily.  "Oh, my dear, this is my real welcome home!  Oh, Lydia,
+Lydia, if you were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"
+
+Lydia laughed.  "Then we'd travel--to all the happy places of the
+world.  We must turn back.  Daddy'll be waiting."
+
+Levine turned obediently, saying as he did so, "Just one thing more,
+then the year's absence will be spanned.  How does the Great Search go
+on?  Do you ever have bad dreams at night, now?"
+
+"Sometimes," replied Lydia.  "Just the other night I woke up with the
+old fear and then--it was very curious--I heard the lap-lapping of the
+lake, and the little murmur of the wind in the pine and the frogs
+cheeping and the steady chirp of the crickets, and, Mr. Levine, the
+queerest sense of comfort came to me.  I can't put it into words.
+Somehow it was as if Something behind all those little voices spoke to
+me and told me things were--were right."
+
+"Lydia," said Levine, quickly, "you've struck the right trail.  I'll
+follow it with you.  What a long way you've come alone, little girl.
+Give me your hand, dear.  I like to feel it on my arm.  Oh, Lydia!
+Lydia!"
+
+"What are you two mooning about," said Amos' voice, as he loomed on
+them through the dusk.
+
+"Enterprises of great pith and moment," replied Levine.  "Got any
+tobacco with you, Amos?"
+
+"No!  We'd better go in the house, anyhow.  The mosquitoes will eat us
+up.  Lydia, Margery's looking for you."
+
+And as far as Lydia was concerned, the evening was ended.
+
+Levine was very busy with the details of the Indian removal for the
+next week or two.  The exodus was accomplished in a business-like
+manner.  A steady line of busses brought the Indians from the
+reservation to the outskirts of Lake City, where rough barracks had
+been erected to care for the government wards while they were being
+concentrated.  The state militia was on guard here, at intervals along
+the road and upon the reservation.  There were some disturbances on the
+reservation, but for the most part, the Indians were dazed and
+unprotesting.  Before the concentration began, the precaution was taken
+of sending Charlie Jackson under guard to the new reservation in the
+Southwest.  Lydia had never seen him after her day at the hearing.  She
+always was to carry in her memory, his handsome bronze face, too early
+marked with lines of despair, as she saw it while she uttered her
+protest to the commissioners.  And it was a hauntingly sad memory to
+carry.
+
+She went with Billy to see the embarking of the Indians in the special
+trains provided for them.  The streets along the line of march were
+lined with whites, silent but triumphant.  It was a beautiful day,
+clear and hot.  Two by two, the Indians moved along the fine old
+elm-shadowed streets, old Wolf at the head, shambling and decrepit, but
+with his splendid old head held high.  Two by two, in utter silence,
+their moccasined feet soundless, old Indians in buckskins, and young
+Indians in store clothes, then squaws, in calico "mother-hubbards,"
+great bundles strapped to their backs, and children in their arms or
+clinging to their skirts.  A long, slow moving line, in a silence that
+even the children did not break.
+
+It took until well in the evening to get the pathetic exiles into the
+trains.  Lydia did not stay after dark.  Profoundly depressed, she made
+Billy take her home.
+
+In the evening she sat with her Emerson open before her, but with her
+unseeing eyes fastened on the open door.  It was a little after nine
+when the chug-chug of Kent's car stopped at the gate and in a moment
+Kent, white faced, appeared in the door.
+
+"John Levine's been shot.  He wants Lydia!"
+
+Without a sound Lydia started after Kent down the path, Amos following.
+Kent packed them into the little car and started back toward town at
+breakneck speed.
+
+"How bad off is he?" asked Amos.
+
+"Can't live," answered Kent.
+
+Still Lydia made no sound though Amos held her firmly in the vain
+attempt to still her trembling.
+
+"How'd it happen?"  Amos' voice broke a little.
+
+"That damned sister of Charlie Jackson and old Susie both took a shot
+at him, just as the last car-load was finished.  The police and the
+militia got 'em right off.  Shot 'em all to pieces.  It looked as
+though there'd be a wholesale fight for a minute but the militia closed
+in and the last train got off."
+
+"Where is John?" asked Amos.
+
+"In Doc Fulton's office.  They can't move him."
+
+No one spoke again.  Kent brought the automobile up with a bang before
+the doctor's house and Lydia, followed closely by the two men, ran up
+to the door, through the outer office to the inner, where a nurse and
+Doc Fulton stood beside a cot.
+
+Levine lay with his face turned toward the door.  When he saw Lydia he
+smiled faintly.  She was quite calm, except for her trembling.  She
+walked quickly to his side and took his hand.
+
+"Looks like I was going to start traveling alone, young Lydia," he said
+feebly.  "I just wanted to tell you--that Great Search--is ending all
+right--don't worry--"
+
+"I won't," said Lydia.
+
+"Only I hate to go alone--my mother--gimme something, Doc."
+
+The doctor held a glass to his lips.  After a moment, Levine said
+again, "My mother used to hold me--" his voice trailed off and Lydia
+said suddenly, "You mean you want me to comfort you like I used to
+comfort little Patience?"
+
+"Yes!  Yes!" whispered Levine.  "It's going to sleep alone I----
+Mother--"
+
+Lydia knelt and sliding her arm under Levine's neck, she pulled his
+head over gently to rest on her shoulder.  Then she began with infinite
+softness the little songs she had not uttered for so many years.
+
+  "'Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet;
+  Make it from simple flowers
+  Plucked from the lowly valleys
+  After the summer showers.'"
+
+  "'Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea . . .'"
+
+  "'I've reached the land of corn and wine
+  And all its riches surely mine.
+  I've reached that heavenly, shining shore
+  My heaven, my home, for evermore.'"
+
+Suddenly the nurse shifted John's head and Doc Fulton lifted Lydia to
+her feet.  "Take her home, Amos," he said.
+
+John Levine had finished the Great Search.
+
+
+Curiously enough, nothing could have done so much toward reinstating
+Lake City in the good opinion of the country at large as did Levine's
+tragic death.  There was felt to be a divine justice in the manner of
+his taking off that partook largely of the nature of atonement.  He had
+led the whites in the despoiling of the Indians.  For this the Indians
+had killed him.
+
+That a white life extinguished for a tribe destroyed might not be full
+compensation in the eyes of that Larger Justice which, after all, rules
+the Universe, did not seriously influence the reaction of public
+opinion toward thinking better of Lake City.  And John Levine, known in
+life as an Indian Graft politician, became in his death a Statesman of
+far vision.
+
+Levine's will was not found at first.  Distant cousins in Vermont would
+be his heirs, if indeed after his estate was settled, it was found that
+there was left anything to inherit.
+
+Kent for a month or so after the tragedy was extremely busy helping to
+disentangle Levine's complicated real estate holdings.  It was found
+that he held heavily mortgaged second growth timber lands in the
+northern part of the State and Kent spent a month superintending a
+re-survey of them.  He was very much broken up by Levine's death, and
+welcomed the heavy work.
+
+In spite of Lydia's deep affection for Levine, she did not feel his
+death as much as Amos did.  For after all, Lydia was young, gloriously
+young, and with a forward-turned face.  Amos had lost in John his only
+real friend, the only human being who in some ways had helped to fill
+in the hopeless gap left by his wife's death.  And Amos, though still a
+young man, kept his face turned backward.
+
+After her first wild grief had expended itself, Lydia found that, after
+all, Levine's tragic death had not surprised her.  She realized that
+ever since she had known Charlie Jackson, she had been vaguely haunted
+by a fear of just such an ending.
+
+July slipped into a breathless, dusty August.  Lydia worked very hard,
+making herself tasks when necessary work was done.  She put up fruit.
+She worked in the garden.  She took up the dining-room carpet and oiled
+the floor and made rugs.  After she had had her swim in the late
+afternoon, she would take up her old position on the front doorstep, to
+sew or read or to dream with her eyes on the pine.
+
+How silently, how broodingly it had stood there, month in, month out,
+year after year!  What did it feel, Lydia wondered, now that the
+Indians were gone?  Was it glad that Levine had been punished?
+
+Billy, trundling up the dusty road from the law office on his bicycle,
+late each afternoon, would stop for a moment or two.  Since the
+tragedy, not a day had gone by that Lydia had not seen him.
+
+"The drought is something frightful," he said to Lydia one afternoon in
+late August, wiping the sweat and dust from his face.  "This is the
+ninth week without rain.  The corn is ruined.  I never knew anything
+like this and Dad says he hasn't either."
+
+"Our garden died weeks ago," said Lydia, listlessly.
+
+Billy looked at her keenly.  "Are you feeling any more cheerful, Lyd?"
+
+Lydia turned her gaze from the burning brown meadows to Billy's tanned,
+rugged face.
+
+"I shall always have a gap in my life, where he went out," she said,
+slowly.  "I shall never get over missing him.  Oh, he was so dear to
+me!  And yet, Billy, it isn't at all like little Patience's death.  He
+didn't depend on me and I didn't live with him so that everything
+doesn't cry his absence to me.  And I've got more resources than I had
+then--"
+
+She laid her hand on the open book in her lap.
+
+"What're you reading?" asked Billy.
+
+"Emerson--Compensation.  Listen, Billy--'We cannot part with our
+friends.  We cannot let our angels go.  We do not see that they only go
+out that archangels may come in.'
+
+"And so," Lydia's voice trembled, but she went on bravely, "I'm trying
+to understand--trying to see how I can make something good come out of
+his poor lost life.  Somehow I feel as if that were my job.  And--and
+the idea helps me.  Oh, my dear John Levine!"
+
+Billy cleared his throat.  "Let's see that passage, Lyd."  He took the
+book and read on: "'The death of a dear friend--wife, lover,
+brother--terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth that was waiting to
+be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation or style of living and allows
+the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.'"
+
+The two young people sat staring at the distant hills.
+
+"Don't you see," Lydia burst out, "that I've got to do something, be
+something, to make all the loss and trouble of my life worth while?"
+
+"I understand," answered Billy.  "What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm not quite sure, yet," replied Lydia, "but I'll tell you as soon as
+I've made up my mind.  Billy, ask your father to come over this
+evening.  Dad is so desperately blue."
+
+Billy rose to go.  "One thing I will tell you, Billy," Lydia went on,
+"I'm going to take the short dairy course this winter, besides my other
+work."
+
+Billy looked at the sweet, resolute face curiously, then he chuckled.
+
+"Whenever you deign to unravel the workings of the mystery you call
+your mind, I'll be crazy to listen," he said.
+
+Early in September, John Levine's will was found.  He had left his
+entire property, unconditionally, to Lydia.
+
+Amos, at first, was frantic with delight.  Lydia was appalled.
+
+"All my life," she half sobbed to her father, "I've been fighting to
+get away from Indian lands.  And Mr. Levine knew how I felt.  Oh, how
+could he do this to me!"
+
+"Don't talk like a fool, Lydia!" roared Amos.
+
+Lydia turned to Kent, who was sitting on the back steps with them.  He
+leaned over and patted her hand.
+
+"Why worry about it, Lyd?  Your father and I'll look out for it all."
+
+"Do I _have_ to keep it?" asked Lydia, tensely.  "Will the law make me?"
+
+"I should say not!  You can give it to me, if you want to," laughed
+Kent.
+
+"But don't you see how I feel?" cried Lydia.  "Don't you see that all
+John Levine's lands up there are haunted by death--his own--and all the
+starving Indians?  Oh, why did he do this to me!"
+
+"I suppose you feel the same way about the cottage," said Amos,
+sarcastically.
+
+"I don't either," contradicted Lydia.  "I'm as happy as I can be that
+we've got that.  But all the rest!  I won't have it, I tell you!  I'd
+rather be poverty stricken all my life."
+
+"Well, don't worry too much about that," said Kent.  "Dave Marshall
+thinks there won't be anything left after the estate is settled, but
+the Indian lands."
+
+"Oh, Kent, you aren't having anything to do with Dave Marshall, are
+you?" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Kent flushed a little.  "Well, his advice can't hurt me.  If it's bad,
+I don't have to take it.  You ought to go out and see his farm, Lydia.
+They're getting the house all fitted with modern conveniences.  Dave's
+going to make a model stock farm."
+
+"Bought with money earned by the Last Chance!" said Lydia.
+
+"You can't be so darned squeamish about where a man gets his money
+these days, Lyd.  Of course, there was no excuse for the Last Chance.
+But Dave's done what he could about it."
+
+Lydia made no reply and Kent looked at her quizzically.  "A New England
+conscience must be something awful to own, eh, Lyd?"
+
+Lydia chuckled.  "It's pretty bad," she admitted, then she went on
+soberly, "but I won't take those Indian lands."
+
+"You can give them to me," reiterated Kent, cheerfully.
+
+"She'll keep them," said Amos, shortly, "or Lydia and I'll have our
+first real row."
+
+"Well, save up the fight till the estate's settled," said Kent,
+soothingly.  "And then you'll know what you're fighting about.  That
+will take some months."
+
+Lydia sighed with relief.  And again Kent laughed.  "Oh, Lyd!  You
+haven't any idea how funny you are!  Come to, old lady!  This is the
+twentieth century!  And twentieth century business ethics don't belong
+to town meeting days.  The best fellow gets the boodle!"
+
+"Then Dave Marshall is the best fellow in our community, I suppose,"
+said Lydia.
+
+"Oh, Gee, Lyd!  After all, he's Margery's father!"
+
+Lydia looked at Kent thoughtfully.  Since the day under the willows, he
+had not made love to her, yet she had the feeling that Kent was devoted
+to her and she wondered sometimes why he liked to spend as much time
+with Margery as with herself.  Then she gave herself a mental shake.
+
+"I'm going to tell you right now, that until I _have_ to I'm not going
+to worry.  I'm going to try to be happy in my senior year."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+CAP AND GOWN
+
+
+"Nature never pretends.  She gives her secrets only to the
+unpretending."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+The fifteen dollars, after all, were disposed of in a highly
+satisfactory manner.  They paid for Lydia's senior cap and gown.
+Perhaps there were other members of the class to whom their senior
+insignia meant as much as they did to Lydia, but that is to be doubted.
+
+Although, ever since her illness, she had firmly resolved never to
+worry again over her meager wardrobe, she almost wept with joy when she
+first beheld herself in cap and gown.  For she looked exactly like
+other girls!  It didn't matter at all, this year, whether or not she
+had a new suit or a new overcoat.  The gown was all-concealing.
+Donning it was like turning from caterpillar to butterfly with a single
+wave of the hand.
+
+Amos and Lizzie were as much impressed as Lydia, but for different
+reasons.  Lizzie was sure that the gown was proof and evidence that
+Lydia had compassed all human knowledge.
+
+"Land, Lydia," she murmured, walking slowly around the slender figure,
+"it makes you look terrible dignified and I'm glad of that.  No one
+could look at you now and not feel that you know an awful lot."
+
+Amos was unimpressed by Lydia's stores of wisdom but it seemed to him
+that there never was such a lovely face as that which looked out at him
+from under the mortar-board cap.  There was a depth to the clear blue
+eyes, a sweetness to the red lips, that moved him so that for a moment
+he could not speak.
+
+"It's an awful pretty idea, wearing the cap and gown, isn't it!" he
+said, finally.  "Somewhere, back East, there's a picture of one of your
+ancestors who taught in an English college.  You look something like
+him."
+
+"Did I have that kind of an ancestor?" asked Lydia with interest.
+"Isn't it too bad that we Americans don't know anything about our
+forebears.  I wonder what the old duck would say if he could see me!"
+
+It was the rainiest Fall within Lydia's recollection.  It seemed, after
+the drought was once broken, as if nature would never leave off trying
+to compensate for the burning summer.  The dark weather had a very
+depressing effect on Amos and instead of growing more resigned to his
+friend's death, he seemed to Lydia to become daily more morose and
+irritable.
+
+In a way, Lydia's conscience smote her.  She knew that her father was
+worrying over her attitude on her inheritance, but she continued to
+avoid the issue with him while the estate was being settled.  Lydia was
+doing heavy work in college.  She actually had entered all the classes
+in dairying possible, while carrying her other college work.  And she
+enjoyed the new work amazingly.
+
+She had not mentioned her purpose to any one of her friends but Billy.
+Therefore when Professor Willis, showing some Eastern visitors through
+the dairy building, came upon her washing cream bottles one afternoon,
+he was rendered entirely speechless for a moment.
+
+Lydia, in a huge white dairy apron and cap, was sluicing the bottles
+happily, the only girl in a class of a dozen men, when Willis came in,
+followed by two tall men in eyeglasses.
+
+"Queer, I admit, to find this sort of thing in a college," he was
+saying, "but decidedly interesting, nevertheless.  Well, Miss Dudley,
+are you--I didn't know--I beg your pardon."
+
+The class, which was working without an instructor, looked up in
+astonishment.  Lydia blushed furiously and the two visitors looked on
+with obvious interest.
+
+"It's a class in bottle sterilizing," she explained.  "It just happens
+to be my turn."
+
+The look of relief on Willis' face made Lydia angry.  She turned her
+back on him and proceeded to let a cloud of steam envelop her and her
+bottles.
+
+"The idiot!  He thought I was dish-washing for a living, I suppose,"
+she murmured to herself.  "What business is it of his, anyhow?"
+
+How Willis got rid of his two guests, he did not say, but half an hour
+later, when Lydia emerged from the dairy building, he was waiting for
+her.  There was a quiet drizzle of rain, as was usual this Fall, and
+Lydia was wearing her old coat, with her mortar-board.  But it was
+clear that the professor of Shakespeare did not know what she wore.  It
+was a half mile through the University farm to the street-car and he
+wanted to re-establish himself with Lydia before some other swain
+appeared.
+
+"Tell me what this means, Miss Dudley!" he said eagerly as he raised
+his umbrella to hold it carefully over the mortar-board.
+
+"It looks as though it meant rain, to me," replied Lydia, shortly.
+
+Willis gave a little gasp.  "Oh!  I beg your pardon!"
+
+His chagrin made Lydia ashamed of herself.  "I don't see why you should
+be so shocked at my trying to learn something useful," she said.
+
+"Oh, but I'm not!  Nothing that you could do would shock me!  You've
+got a good reason, for you're the most sensible girl I ever met.  And
+that's what I'm keen about, the reason."
+
+"The reason?" Lydia stared at the dripping woodland through which they
+were making their way.  "I'm not just sure I had a reason.  I don't
+want to teach.  I do love farming.  I don't see why a woman can't learn
+dairy work as well as a man."
+
+"You're the only girl doing it, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, but what difference does that make?  The boys are fine to me."
+
+"I don't know that that surprises me any," Willis smiled down at the
+pink profile at his shoulder.  "Well, and then what?"
+
+"Then a dairy farm, if Dad and I can rent the makings of one."
+
+"But you have plenty of land, haven't you?  Levine left all his
+property to you, I understand."
+
+Lydia looked quickly up into Willis' face.  "If you were I would you
+keep that property?"
+
+The professor's eyes widened.  "I?  Oh!  I don't know.  It would be an
+awful temptation, I'm afraid."
+
+"I'd rather be poor all my life," said Lydia.  "I'm not afraid of
+poverty.  I've lived with it always and I know it's a sheep in wolf's
+clothing."
+
+"You mean you've got the courage to give the pine land up?" asked
+Willis, quickly.
+
+"It isn't courage.  It's being afraid of my conscience.  I--I feel as
+if I were finishing out John Levine's life for him--doing what he ought
+to have done."
+
+"I wonder if you have any idea what you mean to me!" Willis suddenly
+burst forth.  "You embody for me all the things my puritan grandmothers
+stood for.  By Jove, if the New England men have failed, perhaps the
+Western women will renew their spirit."
+
+Lydia flushed.  "I--I wish you wouldn't talk that way," she protested.
+"I'm not really wise nor very good.  I just feel my way along--and
+there's no one to advise me."
+
+"That's the penalty of growing up, my dear," said Willis.  "We no
+longer have any one to tell us what to do.  Here comes your car.  I'm
+afraid I let the umbrella drip on your cap."
+
+"It doesn't matter," said Lydia, valiantly.
+
+"Miss Dudley--" as he signaled the car, "I'm coming to see you, just as
+often as you'll let me, this winter," and he walked off before Lydia
+could reply.  She sank into a car seat, her cheeks burning, her heart
+thudding.
+
+Early in December, the settlement of the Levine estate was completed.
+John's method of "shoestringing" his property was disastrous as far as
+the size of Lydia's heritage went.  Her father tried to make her
+understand the statement of the Second National Bank, which was acting
+as executor.  And as nearly as Lydia could understand, one portion of
+the estate was used to pay up the indebtedness of another portion,
+until all that was left was the cottage, with a mortgage on it, and
+three hundred and twenty acres of land on the reservation.
+
+The three hundred and twenty acres on the reservation was under a
+cloud.  Part of it was land he had gotten from Charlie's sister.  All
+of it he had obtained from alleged full bloods.
+
+"Then," said Lydia, in a relieved manner, "I really haven't any Indian
+lands at all!"
+
+"Oh, yes, you have," replied Amos.  "The court will take the oath of a
+number of people that the land was obtained from mixed bloods.  Dave
+Marshall has fixed that up."
+
+"Dave Marshall!" gasped Lydia.
+
+Amos nodded.  "He's strong with the Whiskey Trust.  And the Whiskey
+Trust is extra strong wherever there's a reservation."
+
+"Oh, Daddy!" cried Lydia, "we can't take it?  Don't you see we can't?"
+
+It was just after supper and they were in the familiar old living-room.
+Adam was snoring with his head under the base burner, and Lizzie was
+clattering the dishes in the kitchen.  Amos stood by the table, filling
+his pipe, and Lydia with her pile of text books had prepared for her
+evening of study.  Amos' work-blunted fingers trembled as he tamped the
+tobacco into the bowl and Lydia knew that the long dreaded battle was
+on.
+
+"I can't understand why you act so like a fool," began Amos,
+querulously.  "And I can't see why you set your judgment up as better
+than mine.  I swan--even your Mother never did that, except on
+borrowing money."
+
+"It isn't judgment.  It's conviction, Daddy.  And John Levine told me
+to stand by my own convictions, even when they were against his.  Oh,
+how can you be willing to take land stolen in the first place and then
+the theft legalized by the Whiskey Trust!  Why, you don't want me even
+to speak to Dave Marshall now, yet you're willing to take this dirty
+favor from him."
+
+"We won't keep the land.  We'll sell it and have the money to clear up
+the mortgage on the cottage.  I'd take a favor from the devil in hell
+to get this place clear," replied Amos slowly.  He took a turn up and
+down the room.  "I can't see what's happened to children nowadays.  In
+my day we obeyed.  Lydia, I'm not going to discuss this any longer.
+_You've got to take that land_."
+
+Lydia sat with her thin hands clasped before her on the table, her
+clear eyes fastened on her father's face.
+
+"I'm not a child, Daddy," she said in a low voice, "I'm a woman, grown.
+And if you'd wanted me to grow up without any convictions, you should
+have given me different ancestors and then you shouldn't have brought
+me up in a town like Lake City."
+
+Amos looked down at his daughter grimly.  The Daniel Webster picture in
+its black carved frame was just behind him and the somber vision in the
+living and the pictured eyes was identical.
+
+"Can't you see what a fool you are!" he shouted.  "The land can never
+go back to the Indians.  John took good care of that.  If you don't
+take it, somebody else will.  Can't you see!"
+
+Lydia's lips tightened.  "That's not the point.  It's the way we're
+getting it and the way John Levine got it."
+
+"And yet you pretended that you loved and admired Levine!" sneered Amos.
+
+Lydia sprang to her feet.  She was white to her lips.  "Don't repeat
+that remark," she said in a choked voice.  "What do you know about the
+feeling John Levine and I had for each other?  He was the one friend of
+my life."
+
+"Nice way you have of showing it, now he's gone," roared Amos.  "Just
+about the way you show your affection for me.  Will nothing satisfy
+you?  Norton and I never squealed when you and Billy got our claims
+taken away from us.  Doesn't it occur to you it's about time you
+sacrificed something to me!"
+
+Lydia had never seen her father so angry before.  He had often worked
+himself into a tantrum on the subject of money but there was an aspect
+to his anger now that was new to her.  She was trembling but cool.
+
+"I'll do anything you want but this, Dad," she said.
+
+"But this is all I want.  It's what I've wanted for years, this little
+bit of land.  And you haven't any idea what that feeling is."
+
+Like a flash Lydia saw again long aisles of pines, smelled again the
+odor of the needles, heard again the murmuring call of the wind.
+
+"Good God!" cried Amos, tossing his pipe on the table, "poverty's
+hounded me all my life--poverty and death.  The only two people who
+cared about me, Patience and Levine're gone.  Yet here's the chance for
+me to be independent.  Here's a chance for me to make up for the
+failure I've made of life.  A man with a little piece of property like
+this and a little bank account is somebody in the community.  What do I
+care how I get it, as long's I can hold it?  What's a lot of dirty
+Indians to stand between me and my future?  But what do you care?"
+
+"O Daddy!  O Daddy!  How can you talk so to me!" groaned Lydia.  She
+put her hands over her eyes for a moment, swallowed a sob and then
+started for the outer door.  She caught her coat from the nail and
+closed the door behind her.
+
+An irresistible impulse had carried her from the house.  She wanted to
+see Billy.  It was still early and a lantern flickered in the Norton
+barnyard.  She ran along the snowy road and down the drive of the
+Norton yard, pausing beside a lilac bush to see whether it was Billy or
+his father just entering the cowshed.  It was Billy and she ran across
+the barnyard to the shed door.  Billy was whistling to himself as he
+began to bed down the cattle for the night.  Lydia looked at him
+eagerly in the dim light.  How big and strong he was!
+
+"Billy!" she said, softly.
+
+The young man dropped his pitchfork and came toward her.  "What's the
+matter, Lydia!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Dad and I've been having an awful quarrel."
+
+"About the land?" asked Billy quickly.
+
+Lydia nodded.  "Oh, I don't know what to do!"  And then, not having
+meant to do so at all, she suddenly began to cry.
+
+"Why can't they let you alone, damn 'em!" exclaimed Billy, furiously.
+"Come away from that cold doorway, dear."  And he led her into the warm
+stable and over to a harness box.  "There," pulling her down beside him
+on the box, and putting his arm about her, "don't cry, Lydia.  I can't
+stand it.  I'm liable to go over and say things to your father and
+Kent."
+
+There was an edge to his voice as he said this that vaguely alarmed
+Lydia.  She wiped her eyes.
+
+"Kent wasn't there," she said.
+
+"No, but he's behind your father in this.  I'll tell 'em both,
+sometime, what I think of their bullying you this way."
+
+"Kent hasn't bullied me," insisted Lydia.
+
+"No?  Well, give him time!  Poor little girl!  Don't tremble so.  You
+don't have to talk any more about it to any one.  Just send 'em to me."
+
+Lydia smiled through her tears.  "I can't send my own father to you.
+And you and Kent would come to blows."
+
+"We probably would," replied Billy.  "Want my hanky or haven't you wept
+yours full yet?"
+
+"I'm not going to cry any more," said Lydia, raising her head.  Billy
+still held her warmly in the circle of his arm.  The stable was dim and
+quiet and fragrant with clover.  "You're such a comfort, Billy.  Now
+that John Levine's gone, there's no one understands me as you do.  How
+can I reconcile Dad to giving up the land?"
+
+"You can't, Lydia.  You'll just have to reconcile yourself to a
+misunderstanding with him."
+
+"But I can't live that way!" wailed Lydia.
+
+"Well, you have the cottage.  He used to think he'd be perfectly happy
+if he owned that."
+
+"Oh, there's a mortgage on the cottage!" exclaimed Lydia.  "Poor Daddy!
+He wants to pay the mortgage with the lands."
+
+"It's tough luck!  But there's nothing for you to do, Lydia, but to
+stick to it.  Don't weaken and things will come out all right.  See if
+they don't.  And you've always got me.  And if I see they're worrying
+you too much, I'll make trouble for 'em."
+
+A vague, warm sense of comfort and protection was stilling Lydia's
+trembling.  She rose and looked up into his face gratefully.  "I don't
+see why you're so good to me," she said.
+
+"Do you want me to tell you?" began the young man eagerly.
+
+"No!  No!" Lydia began to move hastily toward the door.  "Don't come
+home with me, Billy.  I'll just run back alone."
+
+Billy's face in the lantern light was inscrutable.  "I'll obey
+to-night, Lydia," he said, "but the time's coming, when I won't," and
+he picked up the pitchfork he had dropped.
+
+With the sense of comfort and protection sustaining her, Lydia went
+homeward under the winter stars.  Kent's automobile was standing before
+the gate and Lydia's heart sank.  It was the first time in her life she
+ever had been sorry at the thought of seeing Kent.
+
+He was sitting before the base burner with her father and jumped up to
+help her take her coat off.  He greeted her soberly.
+
+"Your father's been telling me about your discussion, Lyd," he said.
+"You can't mean to stick by your decision!"
+
+Lydia sat down wearily.  "Oh, Kent, don't _you_ begin at me, too."
+
+"But I think I ought to, Lydia," replied Kent, his voice dangerously
+eager.  "I don't think any of your friends have a right to be quiet
+when you're letting a silly scruple ruin your and your father's future."
+
+"It certainly won't ruin my future," said Lydia.  "And I won't let it
+ruin Dad's."
+
+"Now look here, Lydia," began Kent, "let's begin at the beginning and
+sift this thing out."
+
+"But why?" groaned Lydia.  "You know exactly how I feel and why I feel
+it.  And I know how you feel.  We've been debating it for years."
+
+"Yes, but listen," persisted Kent, and once more he began his arguments
+on the Indian question.
+
+Kent had a certain eloquence of speech, yet Lydia, knowing all that he
+would say, gave little heed to his words while she watched his glowing
+face.
+
+"Don't you see?" he ended finally.
+
+"I see how you feel, yes," replied Lydia.  "But just because you can
+list what you call average American business deals that are crooked,
+you aren't justified in being crooked, are you?"
+
+Kent threw out his hand helplessly, and for a moment there was stance
+in the room, then he said,
+
+"Well, after all, there's nothing so selfish as your Puritans.  Of
+course, every one but yourselves is wrong.  And, of course, it doesn't
+occur to you that it might be a decent thing of you to sacrifice your
+own scruples to do a thing that would mean so much to your father."
+
+Lydia looked at Kent quickly.  This was a new angle.  He would have
+followed this opening at once had not Amos spoken for the first time.
+
+"Hold up, Kent," he said in a tired voice.  "Don't heckle her any more.
+After all, I'm getting on toward fifty and I guess it's too late for me
+to begin over, anyhow.  I'll plod along as I always have."
+
+"Oh, Daddy!" cried Lydia, "don't talk that way!  You aren't a bit old.
+You make me feel like a beast, between you."
+
+"Well, we don't mean to," Amos went on, "but I guess we have been
+pretty hard on you."
+
+Amos' weariness and gentleness moved Lydia as no threats could.  Her
+eyes filled with tears and she crossed over quickly to the window and
+looked out on the starlit splendor of the lake.  In how many, many
+crises of her life she had gazed on this self-same scene and found
+decision and comfort there!
+
+Was she selfish?  Was she putting her own desire for an easy conscience
+ahead of her father's happiness?  Amos went into the kitchen for a
+drink and Kent followed her to the window and took both her hands.
+
+"Lydia," he said, "I'm awful sorry to press you so, but you're being
+unfair and foolish, honestly you are.  You used to let me look out for
+you in the old days--the old days when I used to pull little Patience's
+carriage with my bicycle--why can't you trust me now?  Come,
+dearest,--and next year we'll be married and live happy ever after."
+
+Lydia's lips quivered.  All Kent's charm of manhood, all the memories
+of their childhood together, of his boyhood love for her and her baby
+sister, spoke together to win her to his desires.  And after all, what
+could matter so much to her as her father's and Kent's happiness?
+
+"Kent!" she cried with the breathlessness of a new idea, "if I should
+give in and agree to take the land, would you go up there with me and
+turn it into a farm?"
+
+Kent smiled at her pityingly.  "Why, Lyd, there's nothing in that!  Why
+should we try to farm it?  The money is in speculating with it.  I
+could clear up a mint of money for you in a couple of years, if you'll
+give me the handling of it."
+
+But Lydia's eyes were shining now.  "Oh, but listen!  You don't
+understand.  Mr. Levine drove the Indians out, by fraud and murder.
+Yes, he did, Kent.  And yet, he had big dreams about it.  He must have
+had.  He was that kind of a man.  And if we should go up there and turn
+those acres into a great farm, and--and make it stand for something big
+and right--perhaps that would make up for everything!"
+
+"Lord, what a dreamer you are, Lyd," groaned Kent.  "Mr. Dudley, do you
+hear this?"
+
+Amos grunted.  "Nothing looks good to me but this cottage.  I'd have a
+cow and a few pigs and some bees and the whole world could go to the
+devil for all of me."
+
+"Lydia," said Kent, "be sensible.  Don't talk impossibilities."
+
+"What is there impossible about it?" demanded Lydia.
+
+"Gee, easy money on one side, and a lifetime of hard work on the other!
+Yet you act as if there was a choice."
+
+"Kent, can't you understand how I feel?" pleaded Lydia.  "Have you got
+a blind spot in your mind where money is concerned?  Are all the men in
+America money crazy like the men in Lake City?"
+
+"Sure," replied Kent cheerfully.  "Oh, Lydia, honey, don't be so hard!
+Look at your poor old Dad!  Think what it would mean to him.  Don't be
+so doggone sanctimonious!"
+
+Instead of looking at her father, Lydia looked at Kent, long and
+wistfully.  How dear he was to her!  What an inalienable part of her
+life he was!  What was the use of always struggling against her heart.
+Kent smiled into her face.  Her lips trembled and she turned to look at
+Amos.  He was standing by the table, filling his pipe.  Suddenly Lydia
+realized how gray and broken he looked, how bent his shoulders were
+with work, and there swept over her anew an understanding of his utter
+loneliness since her mother's and Levine's death.
+
+With a little inarticulate murmur, she ran across the room and threw
+her arms about his neck.  "Oh, Daddy," she cried, "I'll do it!  I'll
+agree to it!  If only you'll promise me to be happy!"
+
+Amos dropped his pipe.  "Lydia!  You don't mean it!  Why, my little
+girl!  Lord, Kent!  Isn't she just all right!  Make me happy!  Why,
+Lydia, you've made a young man of me--I swan--!"
+
+Kent was holding one hand now, Amos the other.  Both looked at Lydia
+with radiant faces.  And she could but feel an answering glow.
+
+"We'll make this up to you, Lyd, old lady," cried Kent.  "See if we
+don't."  There was a little pause during which the ice boomed.  Then,
+
+"Well, what happens next, now you've settled me?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Something to eat," exclaimed Amos.  "I didn't eat any supper.  I swear
+I haven't eaten for months with any relish.  Lydia, make us some
+chocolate or something."
+
+As Lydia passed through the dining-room with her steaming tray, a
+little later, Lizzie called from her bed and Lydia set down the tray
+and went to her.
+
+"Did they win you over, Lydia?" she asked.  "I went to bed so's not to
+interrupt."
+
+"Yes, they won me," said Lydia.
+
+"Poor child!  I never wished harder'n I have tonight that your mother
+hadn't died.  But never mind!  I guess it's just as well you gave in.
+Kent could win the heart of a bronze image.  Drat him!  Run along with
+the supper, Lydia."
+
+"Now," said Kent, as he sipped his chocolate, "let's lay our plans."
+
+"Not before me," exclaimed Lydia.  "My one stipulation is that you
+don't tell me any of the details."
+
+"All right," said Amos, hastily.  "We'll do anything she wants, now,
+eh, Kent?"
+
+"You bet," replied the young man.
+
+That night, after Kent had gone, Lydia stood long at the living-room
+window which gave on the front gate.  The pine, its boughs powdered
+with snow, kept its lonely vigil over the cottage.
+
+"Yes," whispered Lydia, finally, "your last friend has deserted you,
+but I guess I'm keeping faith with Kent and Dad, anyhow."
+
+Then she went to bed.
+
+For a day or so Lydia avoided Billy Norton.  But she was restless and
+unhappy and found it difficult to keep her mind on her college work.
+Finally, she timed her return from the dairy school, one afternoon, to
+coincide with Billy's home-coming from his office and she overtook him
+Just beyond the end of the street-car line.  The sun was sinking and
+the wind was rising.
+
+"Billy!" called Lydia.
+
+He turned and waited for her with a broad smile.
+
+"Billy," she said without preliminaries, "I gave in!"
+
+"_Lydia_!" he gasped.
+
+"I couldn't stand their pleading.  I gave in.  I hate myself, but Dad
+looks ten years younger!"
+
+"You actually mean you're letting yourself get mixed up with the
+Whiskey Trust and that pup of a Dave Marshall?"
+
+Lydia plodded doggedly through the snow.  "Of course, Kent's tending to
+all that, I refuse to be told the details."
+
+"Lydia!" cried Billy again and there was such a note of pain in his
+voice that she turned her face to his with the same dogged look in her
+eyes that had been expressed in her walk.
+
+"Why," he said, "what am I going to do without you to look up to--to
+live up to?  You can't mean it!"
+
+"But I do mean it.  I fought and fought and I have for years till I'm
+sick of it.  Now, at least, there'll be no more poverty for Dad to
+complain of."
+
+  "'Just for a handful of silver he left us,
+  Just for a ribband to wear in his coat,'"
+
+quoted Billy bitterly.  "Lydia, I can't believe it!"
+
+"It's true," repeated Lydia.  "I couldn't stand Kent and Dad both.  And
+partly I did it for John Levine's memory.  I'm not trying to justify
+myself Billy.  I know that I'm doing something wrong, but I've
+definitely made up my mind to sacrifice my own ease of conscience to
+Dad's happiness."
+
+"You can't do it!  You aren't built that way," exclaimed Billy.
+
+"But I _am_ doing it," reiterated Lydia.
+
+"Look here," he cried, eagerly, "do you expect to keep my respect and
+yet go on with this?"
+
+Lydia did not reply for some time.  They were nearing the cottage, and
+she could see the pine, black against the afterglow, when she said,
+
+"Well, I'm not keeping my own self-respect and yet, I'm glad I'm making
+Dad and Kent happy."
+
+"Kent!  Wait till I see him!"
+
+"You can't change Kent, if I couldn't," replied Lydia.
+
+"I'll not try to change him," said Billy grimly.  "I'll tell him what I
+think of him, though."
+
+They paused by the gate.  Billy looked down at Lydia with a puzzled
+frown.
+
+"How about 'Ducit Amor Patriae' now, Lydia?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she sighed.  "Good night, Billy."
+
+"Good-by, Lydia," said the young man heavily and he turned away,
+leaving her standing at the gate.
+
+But though she had maintained a calm front with Billy, Lydia went over
+and over their conversation that night feverishly before she went to
+sleep.  She tossed and turned and then long after the old livingroom
+clock had struck midnight, she slipped out of bed and crouched on her
+knees, her hands clasped across her pillow, her eyes on the quiet stars
+that glowed through the window.
+
+"O God," she prayed, "O God, if You do exist, help me now!  Don't let
+me lose Billy's respect for I don't know how I can get along without
+it.  God!  God!  Make me believe in You, for I must have Some One to
+turn to!  You have taken mother and little Patience and John Levine
+from me!  Oh, let me keep Billy!  Let me keep him, God, and make me
+strong enough to keep on accepting that three hundred and twenty acres.
+Amen."
+
+Shivering, but somehow quieted, she crept into bed and fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE YOUNGEST SCHOLAR
+
+
+"The Indians knew no home, and so they died."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+If Amos was not happy after Lydia's concession, at least she never had
+seen him so interested in life as he was now.  Nor had Kent ever been
+more considerate of Lydia.  They went to a number of dances and skated
+together frequently in spite of the fact that Kent was very busy with
+his real estate work.
+
+All this, Lydia told herself, should have made her happy, and yet, she
+was not.  Even when Professor Willis took her to a Military hop and
+brought her home in a hack, she was conscious of the feverish sense of
+loss and uncertainty that had become a part of her daily living.
+Several times she had an almost overwhelming desire to tell him what
+she had done.  But she could not bear to destroy the ideal she knew he
+had of her, even for the relief of receiving his sympathy, of which she
+was very sure.
+
+Billy came to see her as usual, and took her to an occasional dance.
+But he was not the friend of old.  And the change was not in any
+neglect of things done, it was in his way of looking at her; in his
+long silences when he studied her face with a grieved, puzzled look
+that made her frantic; in his ceasing to talk over his work with her
+with any air of comradeship, and most of all in his ceasing to bully
+her--that inalienable earmark of the attitude of the lover toward the
+beloved.
+
+Lydia's nerves began to feel the strain before spring came in.  She was
+pale in the morning and fever-flushed in the afternoon and her hands
+were uncertain.  March was long and bleak, that year, but April came in
+as sweetly as a silver bugle call.  The first week in April the ice
+went out of the lake with a crash and boom and mighty upheaval, leaving
+a pellucid calm of blue waters that brought a new light to Lydia's
+face.  She heard the first robin call on her way home from college, the
+day that the ice went out.
+
+She had walked up the road ahead of Billy, her black scholar's gown
+fluttering.  Once, he would have run to overtake her, but now he
+plodded along a block behind, without a sound.  Lydia did not pause at
+the cottage gate.  The call of the robin was in her blood and she swung
+on up the road, past the Norton place, and into the woods.
+
+Young April was there, with its silence a-tip-toe, and its warmth and
+chill.  Lydia drew a deep breath and paused where through the trunks of
+the white birches she caught the glimmer of the lake.  There was a log
+at hand and she sat down, threw her mortar-board on the ground and
+rested, chin cupped in her hands, lips parted, eyes tear dimmed.  She
+was weary of thought.  She only knew that the spiritual rightness with
+which she had sustained her mind and body through all the hard years of
+her youth, had gone wrong.  She only knew that a loneliness of soul she
+could not seem to endure was robbing her of a youth that as yet she had
+scarcely tasted.
+
+She sat without stirring.  The blue of the lake began to turn orange.
+The robin's note grew fainter.  Suddenly there was the sound of hasty
+footsteps through the dead leaves.  Lydia looked up.  Billy was
+striding toward her.  She did not speak, nor did he.  It seemed to her
+that she never had noticed before how mature Billy's face was in its
+new gauntness, nor how deep and direct was his gaze.
+
+He strode up to the log, stooped, and drew Lydia to her feet.  Then he
+lifted her, scholar's gown and all, in his arms and kissed her full on
+the lips, kissed her long and passionately, then looked deep into her
+eyes and held her to him until she could feel his heart beating full
+and quick.
+
+For just a moment, Lydia did not stir, then she threw her arms around
+his neck, hid her face against his shoulder and clung to him with an
+intensity that made him tremble.
+
+The robin's note grew sweeter, fainter.  The lake lap-lapped beyond the
+birches.  Billy slipped his hand under Lydia's cheek and turned her
+face so that he could look into her eyes.  At what he saw there, his
+own firm lips quivered.
+
+"Lydia!" he whispered.
+
+Then he kissed her again.
+
+Lydia freed herself from his arms, though he kept both of her hands in
+his.
+
+"Now," he said gently, with a smile of a quality Lydia never had seen
+on his lips before, "now, sweetheart, are you going to be good?"
+
+"Yes," murmured Lydia, with the contralto lilt in her voice.  "What do
+you want me to do.  Billy?"
+
+"I want what you want, dearest.  I want the old Lydia with the vision.
+Has she come back, or shall I have to look for her again?"
+
+He started as if to take Lydia in his arms once more, but with a sudden
+rich little laugh, she stepped away from him.
+
+"She's here--Oh, Billy, _dearest_!  How could you let her wander around
+alone so long."
+
+"It didn't hurt my cause any for her to miss me," answered Billy,
+grimly, "though I didn't realize that till a moment ago.  Stop your
+trembling, Lydia.  I'm here to look out for you, for the rest of time."
+
+"I can hear Adam barking," said Lydia.  "Dad must have come home.  Take
+me back, Billy."
+
+"All right," replied Billy.  "I will just as soon as you tell me
+something."
+
+Lydia looked up into his face.  "Not that just yet, please, Billy.  I
+must make things right with Dad and Kent."
+
+Billy seized her shoulders.  "Is there anything between you and Kent,
+Lydia?" he said, jealously.
+
+"Not in words," she answered, "but of course he's gone ahead with my
+land deal, with the idea he'd share in it."
+
+Billy's hands tightened on her shoulders.  "Dear," Lydia went on
+pleadingly, "don't spoil this perfect moment.  We must have this,
+always, no matter what comes."
+
+"Nothing can come," replied Billy sternly.  "Give me your hand, little
+girl.  It's getting cold in these woods."
+
+They walked back to the cottage in silence, hand in hand.  They paused
+at the gate and Lydia pointed through the dusk at the new moon.
+
+"Let's wish on it," she said.  "Close your eyes, and wish."
+
+Billy closed his eyes.  A kiss as soft as the robin's note fell on his
+lips and the gate clicked.  He opened his eyes and stood looking up the
+path long after the door closed, his hat in his hand.
+
+Lydia wandered into the dining-room quite casually.
+
+"For heaven's sake, Lydia!" cried Amos.  "I was just going to start on
+a hunt for you!"
+
+"I took a walk in the woods," explained Lydia, "and was gone longer
+than I realized."
+
+"Supper's ready.  Sit right down," said Lizzie, looking at Lydia,
+intently.
+
+Amos was absorbed in his own thoughts during the meal.  He and Kent had
+both been worried and absent minded, lately.  He paid no heed to the
+fact that Lydia only played with her food and that during the meal she
+smiled at nothing.  But old Lizzie, who had worried herself half sick
+over Lydia, watched her with growing curiosity.
+
+"Seen Kent, to-day, Lydia?" she asked.
+
+After a moment--"Did you speak to me, Lizzie?" Lydia inquired.
+
+"Yes, I did.  I asked if you'd seen Kent to-day."
+
+"I?  No, I haven't seen Kent.  We had a quiz in chemistry, to-day."
+
+"What's that got to do with anything?" grunted Lizzie.  But she asked
+no more questions.
+
+Ma Norton came over during the evening to borrow some yeast.  Amos was
+working over some figures on a bit of paper.  Lydia was sitting with a
+text book in front of her.  She had not turned a leaf in twenty
+minutes, to Lizzie's actual count.
+
+"Spring's here," said Ma.  "Though there's still a bite in the air.
+Not that Billy seems to notice it.  I found him sitting on the front
+steps with his cigar, as if it was June."
+
+Lizzie gave Lydia a quick look and wondered if she only imagined that
+her cheeks were turning pinker.
+
+"I can't sit down," Ma went on, "I've got to set this sponge to rise."
+
+"I'll walk home with you, Mrs. Norton," said Lydia, suddenly.  "It
+seems as if one couldn't get enough of this first spring day."
+
+"Do!"  Ma's voice was always extra cordial when she spoke to Lydia.
+
+Lizzie watched the door close behind the two.  "I knew it," she
+exclaimed.
+
+"Knew what?" inquired Amos, looking up from his figures.
+
+"That there was a new moon," answered the old lady, shortly, trudging
+off to her bedroom.
+
+"Liz is getting childish," thought Amos, returning to his work.
+
+"Bill's still on the front porch," said Ma Norton as they reached the
+Norton driveway.  "Do go speak to him, Lydia.  He's amiable to-night,
+but he's been like a bear for months."
+
+Billy's mother went on into the kitchen entrance and Lydia went over to
+the dim figure on the steps.
+
+"Your mother told me to speak to you," she said meekly.
+
+"I heard her."  Billy gave a low laugh.  "Come up here in the shadow,
+sweetheart, and tell me if you ever saw such a moonlit and starlit
+night."
+
+But Lydia did not stir.  "Honestly, I don't dare look at the sky any
+longer.  I have a quiz in rhetoric to-morrow and I've _got_ to get my
+mind on it."
+
+Billy came down the steps.  "Then I'll walk home with you."
+
+"No, you won't.  I--I just came over to see if it's all real.  Just to
+touch you and then run back.  I'd rather you didn't walk back with me."
+
+The night was brilliant and Billy, responding to some little
+petitioning note in Lydia's voice, did not offer to touch her but stood
+looking down at the sweet dim face turned up to his.  She lifted her
+hand, that thin hand with the work calluses on it, and ran it over his
+cheeks, brushed her cheek against his shoulder, and then ran away.
+
+She finished her studying and went to bed early, only to lie awake for
+hours.  At last, she crept out of bed and as once before, she clasped
+her hands and lifted her face to the heavens.  "Thank you, God!" she
+whispered.  Then she went to sleep.
+
+The next night, Kent came out to the cottage.  Lydia dreaded his coming
+so little that she was surprised.  Yet this day had been one of
+continual surprise to her.  She had wakened to a dawn of robin songs,
+and had dressed with an answering song in her own heart.  She was as
+one who had never known sorrow or anxiety.  Her whole future lay before
+her, a clear and unobstructed pathway.
+
+For Lydia had found herself.  She was a creature to whom a great love
+and devotion were essential as motive forces.  In turn she had given
+this, in childish form, to her mother, to little Patience and to
+Levine.  One by one these had been taken from her and she had struggled
+to give this devotion to Kent, but she could not give where there was
+no understanding.
+
+And now she saw that for years it had been Billy.  Billy who combined
+all the best of what her mother, her baby sister, and Levine had meant
+to her, with something greatly more--the divinity of passion--a thing
+she could not understand, yet that had created a new world for her.
+
+Kent tossed his hat on the couch and shook his head at Amos.  "Dave's
+not going to get away with it.  He's got some kind of a row going with
+the Whiskey people and he says we might as well count him out.  I don't
+know what to do now."
+
+Amos groaned.  "Lord, what luck!"
+
+"Don't let it worry you," said Lydia calmly.  "I made up my mind to-day
+that I'd go ahead and enter on that land just as other folks are doing,
+in the good old way.  I'm going to make a farm up there, that will blot
+out all memory of what Mr. Levine did.  But I'm going to work for it as
+a homesteader has to and not take any advantage through Mr. Levine's
+graft."
+
+Kent looked up crossly.  "Oh, Lydia, for heaven's sake, don't begin
+that again!"
+
+Lydia crossed the room and put her hand on Kent's shoulder as he sat on
+the couch.
+
+"Kent, look at me," she said, then, very quietly, "I'm going to
+homestead that land."  There was no escaping the note of finality in
+her decision.
+
+Kent's face whitened.  He looked up steadily at Lydia.  Amos and Lizzie
+sensed that they were spectators of a deeper crisis than they
+understood and they watched breathlessly.  Kent rose slowly.  The sweat
+stood on his forehead.
+
+"You know what that means, as far as I'm concerned," he said.
+
+Lydia, chin up, gaze never more clearly blue, nodded.
+
+"Yes, Kent, but we never would have been happy.  You and Margery were
+meant for each other, anyhow."
+
+"Lydia!  Lydia!" exclaimed Kent hoarsely, half angrily, half pleadingly.
+
+"No, you won't feel badly, when you think it over.  Go to Margery now
+and tell her, Kent."
+
+Kent picked up his cap.  "I--I don't understand," he said.  Then,
+angrily, "You aren't treating me right, Lydia.  I'll talk to you when
+I'm not so sore," and he walked out of the house.
+
+Lydia turned to Amos and Lizzie.  "There," she said, happily, "I've got
+Kent settled for life!"
+
+Amos sank into his armchair.  "Lydia, have you lost your mind!" he
+groaned.
+
+"No, I've found it, Daddy.  Poor Dad, don't look as if you'd fathered a
+lunatic!"
+
+Amos shook his head.
+
+"Daddy, let's homestead that land!  Let's quit this idea of getting
+something by graft.  Let's do like our forefathers did.  Let's
+homestead that land!  Let's earn it by farming it."
+
+Lydia's father looked at her, long and meditatively.  He was pretty
+well discouraged about the probability of ever getting a clear title to
+the land through Kent or Marshall.  And the longer he looked at Lydia,
+the more his mind reverted to New England, to old tales of the farm on
+which he and his ancestors had been bred.
+
+"A man with three hundred and twenty acres of land is a power in the
+community," he said, suddenly.
+
+"Oh, yes, Dad!" cried Lydia.
+
+"You never know what a feeling of independence is," said Lizzie, "till
+you own land and raise wheat."
+
+Amos stared out the door into the darkness.  Little by little Lydia saw
+creeping into his face new lines of determination, a new sort of pride
+that the thought of the selling of the lands had not put there.  He
+cleared his throat.
+
+"Hang it, Lydia, I'm not as hard as you think I am.  I want you to be
+happy.  And I'm not so damned old as you think I am.  I'm good for
+homesteading, if you and Liz are.  A farmer with three hundred and
+twenty acres!  God!"
+
+Lydia nodded.  Amos began to walk the floor.  "I'm still a young man.
+If I had the backing that land gives a man, I could clean out a lot of
+rottenness in the State.  Even if I only did it by showing what a man
+with a clean record could make of himself."
+
+"That's just the point," cried Lydia eagerly, "and your record wouldn't
+have been clean, if you'd gotten it through Marshall."
+
+"What young men need nowadays," Amos went on, "is to get back to the
+old idea of land ownership.  Three hundred and twenty acres!  Lydia,
+why can't I enter on it to-morrow?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Lydia.
+
+"If I take Brown's offer for the cottage, it would leave us enough to
+get a team and I bet I could hire a tractor to get to the cleared
+portion of it, this Fall.  A hundred acres are clear, you know.  I
+might as well quit the factory now, eh, Lydia?"
+
+With a laugh that had a sob in it, Lydia kissed her father and whirled
+out the door.  Billy was coming in at the gate.  She flew down to seize
+his hand and turn him toward the road.
+
+"Let's walk!  I've such quantities to tell you!"
+
+Billy turned obediently, but paused in the shadow of the pine.  "Lydia,
+I can't tell you what it means to me.  No matter what bigger things may
+seem to happen to me, nothing can equal the things I've felt and
+dreamed to-day."
+
+Then he put his arms about Lydia and kissed her, and she put her arms
+about his neck and laid her head against his shoulder.  They stood thus
+motionless while the pine whispered above them.  And in the intensity
+of that embrace all the griefs of Lydia's life were hallowed and made
+purposeful.
+
+"Lydia," said Billy, "I want to tell Mother and Dad.  Will you come
+over home with me, now?"
+
+"Yes," replied Lydia, "and then we must tell my father and Lizzie.  Oh,
+Billy, I forgot," as they started down the road, "I've decided to
+homestead that land."
+
+"But--why, Lydia dear, you're going to be a lawyer's wife.  For
+heaven's sake, let that beastly land go."
+
+"No, I'm going to be a pioneer's wife!"
+
+There was a little pause, then Billy laughed uncertainly.  "Well, I'm
+not going to talk about it to-night.  I'm in a frame of mind to-night
+where I'd promise you to be an Indian chief if you ask it.  Mother and
+Dad are in the kitchen."
+
+They opened the kitchen door and stepped in.  Pa Norton was sitting in
+his stocking feet, reading the evening paper.  Ma was putting away the
+day's baking.  She paused with a loaf of bread in her hand as the two
+came in and Pa looked over his glasses.
+
+"Mother and Dad," said Billy, uncertainly, "I--I've brought Lydia home
+to you!  Look at her, Dad!  Isn't she a peach!"
+
+Lydia stood with her back against the door, cheeks scarlet, golden head
+held high, but her lips quivering.
+
+Ma dropped her loaf of bread.  "Oh, Lydia," she cried, "I thought that
+numskull of a Billy never would see daylight!  I've prayed for this for
+years.  Come straight over here to your mother, love."
+
+But Pa Norton had dropped his paper when Ma dropped her bread and had
+not paused for comments.  He made three strides to Lydia, and gave her
+a great hug and a kiss.  Then he said, "First time I saw you carrying
+that milk for Billy's books, I said, there's the wife Billy ought to
+have.  Ma, wasn't she the dearest--"
+
+But Ma shoved him aside contemptuously.  "Get over and talk to Billy.
+This is a woman's affair.  Who cares about reminiscences now.  Oh,
+Billy, do you remember I used to worry because she didn't keep the back
+of her neck clean!"
+
+"Who's reminiscencing now?" asked Pa belligerently.
+
+Everybody laughed.  Then Pa sighed.  "Well, I feel almost reconciled
+now to Bill's giving up farming.  When're you going to be married?"
+
+Lydia blushed.  "Oh, not for a long time.  Now, let's go and tell my
+people, Billy."
+
+Out in the night again!  Curious how long the short walk to the cottage
+could be made!  Curious how near the stars were--heaven just over the
+road where the lovers strolled.  Not strange that such ecstasy cannot
+last forever.  The human mind could not bear that heaven-born rapture
+too long.
+
+Lizzie was mending.  Amos was sitting in his arm chair, with a bit of
+paper on which he was figuring.  Lydia flew across the room and dropped
+on her knees beside him.
+
+"Oh, Daddy dear, look at me!  Billy's here and he's always going to be
+here.  Tell us you're glad."
+
+Amos looked up with a jerk.  First at Billy standing stalwart and grave
+by the table, his deep eyes as steady as the hand he held out to
+Lizzie.  Then at his daughter, with her transformed face.
+
+"But," protested Amos, "I thought it was to be Kent."
+
+"Oh, it couldn't have been Kent," exclaimed Lydia.  "We never would
+have understood each other.  Kent was for Margery."
+
+A frown gathered on Amos' face.  He did not really want Lydia to marry
+any one.  All that had reconciled him to the thought of Kent had been
+Kent's relation to the Indian lands.  And now, he discovered that he
+didn't want to give his daughter to any one.  He threw a jealous arm
+about her.
+
+"No, you can't have her, Billy," he said.  "Nobody shall have her.
+She's too good for the best man living."
+
+"Yes, she is," agreed Billy.  "But that isn't the point.  The point is
+that Lydia actually wants me.  I don't understand it myself, but she
+does and I know I can make her happy."
+
+"I can make her happy myself," said Amos, gruffly.
+
+"But you haven't," retorted Billy.  "Look at the way you've acted about
+this land matter.  And God knows, she deserves to be happy at any cost.
+Good heavens, when I think of her, it seems to me that nothing could be
+too much for her.  I think of her trudging those miles in her patched
+old clothes to buy her school books--what a thin, big-eyed kiddie she
+was.  Why, even as a cub, I used to appreciate her.  And then when she
+stood up before the hearing, the bravest man among us, and when she got
+sick trying to earn those silly Prom clothes----  My God, Amos, if
+Lydia wants me, or the moon, or a town lot in South Africa, it's up to
+you to give it to her."
+
+Amos did not reply for a moment.  Down through the years he was
+watching a thin little figure trudge with such patience and sweetness
+and determination as he seemed never before to have appreciated.
+Slowly his hold loosened on Lydia's shoulders and he looked into her
+face.
+
+"Do you want to marry Billy?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, Daddy, yes," whispered Lydia.
+
+Amos looked up at the young man, who stood returning his gaze.  "Take
+her, Billy, and heaven help you if you're not good to her, for John
+Levine's spirit will haunt you with a curse."
+
+Billy raised Lydia to her feet and the extraordinary smile was on his
+face.
+
+"What do you think about it, Lizzie?" he asked.  Lizzie, who had been
+crying comfortably, wiped her eyes with the sock she was darning.
+
+"I'm thinking that any one that can bring the look to Lydia's face
+she's been wearing for twenty-four hours, deserves her.  Rheumatism or
+no, down I get on my old knees to-night and give thanks--just for the
+look in that child's eyes."
+
+And now for a while, Lydia was content to live absolutely in the
+present, as was Billy.  Surely there never was such an April.  And
+surely no April ever melted so softly into so glorious a May.  Apple
+blossoms, lilac blooms, violets and wind flowers and through them,
+Lydia in her scholar's gown, hanging to Billy's arm, after the day's
+work was done.
+
+She seemed singularly uninterested in the preparations for
+Commencement, though she went through her final examinations with
+credit.  But the week before Commencement she came home one afternoon
+with blazing cheeks.  Billy was at the cottage for supper and when they
+had begun the meal, she exploded her bomb.
+
+"Dad!  Billy!  Lizzie!  They've elected me a member of the Scholars'
+Club!"
+
+"For the love of heaven!" exclaimed Amos, dropping his fork.
+
+"Why not?" asked Lizzie.
+
+"Lydia, dear, but I'm proud of you," breathed Billy.
+
+"Professor Willis told me, this afternoon," Lydia went on, "and I
+laughed at him at first.  I thought he was teasing me.  Why only
+high-brows belong to the Scholars' Club!  Prexy belongs and the best of
+the professors and only a few of the post-graduate pupils.  But he says
+I was elected.  I told him lots of students had higher standings than
+I, and he only laughed and said he knew it.  And I've got to go to that
+banquet of theirs next week!"
+
+"Fine!" said Billy.
+
+"Fine!  Why, Billy Norton, I never went to a banquet in my life.  I
+don't know what forks to use, and I _never saw a finger bowl_!"
+
+Amos grinned.  "What's the use of being a scholar, if that sort of
+thing bothers you?"
+
+"I might get a book on etiquette and polish up," said Lydia,
+thoughtfully.  "I'll get one to-morrow, and practise on the family."
+
+Amos groaned, but to no avail.  Lydia borrowed a book on etiquette from
+the library and for a week Amos ate his supper with an array of silver
+and kitchen-ware before him that took his appetite away.  He rebelled
+utterly at using the finger bowls, which at breakfast were porridge
+dishes.  Lizzie, however, was apt and read the book so diligently while
+Lydia was in class that she was able to correct Lydia as well as Amos
+at night.
+
+Ma Norton had insisted on making Lydia a white mull graduation dress.
+She would not let either Lizzie or Lydia help her.  She had been
+daughter-hungry all her life and since she made her own wedding gown,
+no bit of sewing had given her the satisfaction that this did.
+
+So it was that Lydia, wearing the mull under her scholar's gown, and
+with the precepts of the book on etiquette in her mind, attended the
+Scholars' banquet, timidly but not with the self-consciousness that she
+might otherwise have felt.
+
+Billy left her at the door of the hall and Professor Willis took her in
+to dinner.  There were only two other women there, but Lydia did not
+mind.
+
+"You never told me," said Willis, after Lydia had safely chosen her
+salad fork, "what you've done about the three hundred and twenty acres."
+
+Lydia looked up at him quickly.  She had been dreading this moment for
+some time.
+
+"I'm going to give up John Levine's claim on it, and enter on it as a
+homesteader."
+
+"But what an undertaking!" exclaimed Willis.
+
+"I'll not go alone," said Lydia gently.  "Billy Norton will go with me."
+
+Willis turned white, and laid down his salad fork.  Lydia turned her
+head away, then looked back, her eyes a little tear dimmed.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said.
+
+"Don't be," he answered, after a moment.  "You never did a kinder thing
+than to tell me this now--before--not but what it would have been too
+late, had you told me two years ago."
+
+"Oh, I am so sorry," repeated Lydia miserably.
+
+"But you mustn't be!  Besides, you and I are both scholars and scholars
+are always philosophers!"
+
+He was silent for the rest of the banquet, in spite of his philosophy.
+But when he was called on for his toast, which was the last one, he
+rose coolly enough, and began steadily,
+
+"My toast is to all scholars, everywhere, but also to one scholar in
+particular.  It is to one who was born with a love of books, to one who
+made books--good books--so intimate a part of her life that she made
+poverty a blessing, who combined books and living so deeply that she
+read her community aright, when others failed to do so, to one who is a
+scholar in the truest sense of the word--a book lover with a vision.  I
+drink to the youngest and sweetest scholar of us all!" and he bowed to
+Lydia.
+
+How she got through the congratulations and out to Billy, patiently
+waiting at the main campus gate, Lydia was not sure, for she was quite
+drunk with surprise and pleasure.  After she had told it all to Billy,
+and once more they were standing under the pine at the gate, she said,
+
+"Billy, will you go up with Father and Lizzie and me to open up the
+three hundred and twenty acres?"
+
+Billy answered slowly.  "There's nothing I'd like better.  I was born
+to be a farmer.  But, Lydia, it looks to me as if, as a lawyer, I'd be
+a more useful citizen, the way things are now in the country."
+
+Lydia shook her head.  "We've got too many lawyers in America.  What I
+think America needs is real love of America.  And it seems to me the
+best way to get it is to identify oneself with the actual soil of the
+community.  What I want is this.  That you and I, upon the ground where
+poor John Levine did such wrongs, build us a home.  I don't mean a home
+as Americans usually mean the word.  I mean we'll try to found a family
+there.  We'll send the roots of our roof tree so deep into the ground
+that for generations to come our children's children will be found
+there and our family name will stand for old American ideals in the
+community.  I don't see how else we Americans can make up to the world
+for the way we've exploited America."
+
+Billy stood with his arm about the slender "scholar."  Suddenly there
+flooded in upon him the old, old call, the call that had brought his
+Pilgrim forefathers across the Atlantic, the call that was as old as
+the yearning for freedom of the soil.
+
+"Lord!" he cried, "how glad I'll be to go up there!  Think of beginning
+our life together with such a dream!"
+
+"I believe John Levine would be glad, if he knew," said Lydia,
+wistfully.
+
+"I know he'd be glad. . . .  Lydia, do you love me, dear?"
+
+"Love you!  Oh, more than all the world!  You know it, don't you?"
+
+"I know it, but I can't believe it."  His arm tightened around Lydia
+and as on just such an evening, four years before, he said,
+
+"What a wonderful night!"
+
+A wonderful night, indeed!  Sound and scent of bursting summer.
+Syringas coming as lilacs went.  The lake, lap-lapping on the shore.
+The lazy croak of frogs and the moon sinking low over the cottage.
+Above them the pine, murmuring as of old.  Life and the year at the
+full.  A wonderful night, indeed!
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYDIA OF THE PINES***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lydia of the Pines, by Honoré Willsie Morrow
+
+
+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: Lydia of the Pines
+
+
+Author: Honoré Willsie Morrow
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 4, 2005  [eBook #16803]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYDIA OF THE PINES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+LYDIA OF THE PINES
+
+by
+
+HONORE WILLSIE
+
+Author of
+
+"The Heart of the Desert," "Still Jim," etc.
+
+With Frontispiece in Colors by Eric Papse
+
+   [Transcriber's note: frontispiece missing from book.]
+
+A. L. Burt Company
+Publishers------New York
+Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I  THE TOY BALLOON
+    II  THE HEROIC DAY
+   III  THE COTTAGE
+    IV  THE RAVISHED NEST
+     V  ADAM
+    VI  THE COOKING CLASS
+   VII  THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE
+  VIII  THE NOTE
+    IX  THE ELECTION
+     X  THE CAMP
+    XI  LYDIA GIGGLES
+   XII  THE HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR
+  XIII  THE INDIAN CELEBRATION
+   XIV  THE HARVARD INSTRUCTOR
+    XV  THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS
+   XVI  DUCIT AMOR PATRIAE
+  XVII  THE MILITARY HOP
+ XVIII  THE END OF A GREAT SEARCH
+   XIX  CAP AND GOWN
+    XX  THE YOUNGEST SCHOLAR
+
+
+
+
+LYDIA OF THE PINES
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE TOY BALLOON
+
+
+"I am the last of my kind.  This is the very peak of loneliness."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+There is a State in the North Mississippi Valley unexcelled for its
+quiet beauty.  To the casual traveler there may be a certain monotony
+in the unending miles of rolling green hills, stretching on and on into
+distant, pale skies.  But the native of the State knows that the
+monotony is only seeming.
+
+He knows that the green hills shelter in their gentle valleys many
+placid lakes.  Some of them are shallow and bordered with wild rice.
+Some are couched deep in the hollow of curving bluffs.  Some are
+carefully secreted in virgin pine woods.  From the train these pines
+are little suspected.  Fire and the ax have long since destroyed any
+trace of their growth along the railway.
+
+Yet if the traveler but knew, those distant purple shadows against the
+sky-line are primeval pine woods, strange to find in a State so highly
+cultivated, so dotted with thriving towns.
+
+In summer the whole great State is a wonderland of color.  Wide wheat
+lands of a delicate yellowish green sweep mile on mile till brought to
+pause by the black green of the woods.  Mighty acres of corn land,
+blue-green, march on the heels of the wheat.  Great pastures riotous
+with early goldenrod are thick dotted with milk herds.  White
+farmhouses with red barns and little towns with gray roofs and green
+shaded streets dot the State like flower beds.
+
+An old State, as we measure things out of New England, settled by New
+Englanders during the first great emigration after the War of 1812.
+Its capital, Lake City, lays claim to almost a century of existence.
+Lying among the hills in the northern part of the State, it contains
+both the state capitol and the state university.  Of its thirty
+thousand inhabitants, five thousand are students and another five
+thousand are state legislators and state employees.
+
+The town is one of quiet loveliness.  It lies in the curving shore of
+one of the most beautiful of the little inland lakes.  The university
+campus lies at the northern end of the curve.  The dome of the capitol
+rises from the trees at the southern end.  Between, deep lawns stretch
+to the water's edge with fine old houses capping the gentle slope of
+the shore.  Inland lies the business section of the town, with the less
+pretentious of the dwellings.  The whole city is dotted with great elms
+and maples, planted three quarters of a century ago.
+
+A quiet town, Lake City, with an atmosphere that might well belong to
+New England,--beauty, culture, leisure, are its hallmarks.
+
+Fifteen years ago half a mile inland from the lake was an empty block
+that once had been a farm pasture.  Three fine old oaks stood with tops
+together in the center of the block.  The grass was still firm and
+green and thick in the ancient pasture except for narrow trails worn by
+children's feet.  To the initiated each trail told its own story.
+There was a hollow square that formed the baseball diamond.  There was
+a straight, short cut that led to the little cress-grown spring.  There
+were the parallel lines for "Come-Come Pull Away," and there were
+numerous bald spots, the center of little radiating trails where, in
+the fall, each group of children had its complicated roasting oven in
+which potatoes and "weenies" were cooked.
+
+On one August afternoon the pasture seemed deserted.  It was circus day
+and the children of the surrounding blocks had all by one method or
+another won admission to the big tent on the hill east of the town.
+
+Yet not quite all the children.  For under one of the oak trees was a
+baby carriage in which a little girl of two lay fast asleep.  And far
+above her, perched lightly but firmly in a swaying fork of the oak, was
+a long-legged little girl of twelve.  She sat where she could peer
+easily down on her small sleeping sister, yet high enough to be
+completely hidden from casual view.  She was a thin youngster, with
+short curling hair of a dusty yellow.  The curly hair did not hide the
+fine square head, a noble head for so small a girl, set well on the
+little square shoulders.  Her eyes were blue and black lashed, her nose
+nondescript, her mouth large, her chin square and her little jaw line
+long and pronounced.  She wore a soiled sailor suit of blue galatea.
+Caught in the crotch of two opposite branches was a doll almost as
+large as the sleeping child below.  It was a queer old-fashioned doll,
+with a huge china head, that displayed brilliant black hair and eyes as
+blue as those of her little mistress.  The doll wore a clumsily made
+sailor suit of blue calico, which evidently had been washed recently,
+but not ironed.  It is necessary to meet the doll properly, for she was
+an intimate and important member of the little girl's family.  Her name
+was Florence Dombey.
+
+A battered red book lay in Florence Dombey's lap.  It was called, "With
+Clive in India."  It was written by G. A. Henty and told of the
+marvelous and hair-breadth adventures of an English lad in an Indian
+campaign.
+
+Florence Dombey's attention, however, was not on the book.  It was
+riveted, hectically, on her mistress, who with her tongue caught
+between her lips was deftly whittling a cigar box cover into doll
+furniture, of a scale so tiny that even had Florence Dombey had a doll
+of her own, it could not have hoped to use the furniture.
+
+It was very quiet in the oak tree.  The little furniture-maker spoke
+softly to Florence Dombey occasionally, but otherwise crickets and
+locusts made the only sounds on the summer air.
+
+Suddenly she closed the knife sharply.  "Darn it!  I've cut myself
+again," she said.  She dropped the knife down the neck of her blouse
+and began to suck her finger.  "Here, let me have Henty, Florence
+Dombey.  Don't try to pig it, all the time.  You know I don't get
+hardly any time to read."
+
+The furniture and the remains of the cigar-box cover followed the knife
+into her blouse and she opened the book.  But before she had begun to
+read there was a sleepy little call from below.
+
+"Yes, baby!" called the child.  "Here's Lydia, up in the tree!  Watch
+me, dearie!  See me come down.  Here comes Florence Dombey first."
+
+With some difficulty the book followed the knife and the furniture into
+the blouse.  Florence Dombey, being hastily inverted, showed a length
+of light martin cord wrapped about her cotton legs.
+
+"Here she comes, baby!  Catch now for Lydia."
+
+The baby below, a tiny plump replica of Lydia, sat up with a gurgle of
+delight and held up her arms as Florence Dombey, dangling unhappily,
+upside down, on the end of the marlin cord, was lowered carefully into
+the perambulator.
+
+"And here I come.  Watch me, baby!"
+
+With a swing light and agile as a young monkey, Lydia let herself down,
+landing with a spring of which an acrobat might have boasted, beside
+the perambulator.
+
+"There, sweetness!"--kissing the baby--"first we'll fix Florence
+Dombey, then we'll start for home."
+
+"Florence, home wiv baby."
+
+"Yes, it's getting near supper time."  Lydia tucked the still
+hectically staring doll in beside her small sister, turned the
+perambulator around and ran it along one of the little paths to the
+sidewalk.  She hoisted it to the sidewalk with some puffing and several
+"darn its," then started toward the block of houses, north of the
+pasture.
+
+At the crossing she met a small girl of her own age, who carried a toy
+balloon, and a popcorn ball.
+
+"Hello, Lydia!" she cried.  "It was a perfectly lovely circus!"
+
+"Was it?" said Lydia, with an indifferent voice that something in her
+blue eyes denied.  "Well, I had to take care of little Patience!"
+
+"Huh!" shrilled the little girl, "old Lizzie would have done that!  I
+think your father's mean not to give you the money."
+
+Lydia's red cheeks went still redder.  "My father's got plenty of
+money," she began fiercely.  Here the baby interrupted.
+
+"Baby love pritty--Baby love--" she held out two beseeching dimpled
+hands toward the red balloon.
+
+"Patience, you can't have it," cried Lydia.  "It--it'll make your tummy
+ache.  I'll buy you one when you're older."
+
+The black-eyed child, holding the red balloon, suddenly kissed little
+Patience, who was the pet of all the children in the neighborhood, and
+put the string of her balloon into the dimpled hand.  "I had the
+circus--you can have the balloon," she said.
+
+Lydia jerked the string away and held it out to the owner.
+
+"We're no cheerity charities, Margery," she said.  "I'll get Patience a
+balloon."
+
+"You're an awful liar and a cruel beast, Lydia!" cried Margery.  She
+snatched the string and tied it about the baby's wrist.  "You know you
+can't buy her one and you know she'll cry herself sick for one, now
+she's seen mine, and I guess I love her as much as you do."
+
+Lydia looked from the cherub in the perambulator, crowing ecstatically
+over the red bubble that tugged at her wrist, to the defiant Margery.
+
+"I'll let her have it, Margery," she said reluctantly.  "I'll make you
+a doll's high chair."
+
+"All right," said Margery, nonchalantly.  "Face tag!  So long!"
+
+Lydia ran the perambulator along the board walk.  The street was
+macadamized and bordered with thrifty maple trees.  Back of the maple
+trees were frame houses, of cheap and stupid construction.  Before one
+of these Lydia paused.  It was a dingy brown house, of the type known
+as "story and a half."  There was a dormer window at the top and a bow
+window in the ground floor and a tiny entry porch at the front.
+
+Lydia opened the gate in the picket fence and tugged the perambulator
+through and up to the porch.
+
+"There, baby mine, shall Lydia take you in for your supper?"
+
+"Supper," cooed little Patience, lifting her arms.
+
+Lydia lifted her to the porch with surprising ease.  The little two
+year old should have been no light weight for the little mother of
+twelve.  She stood on the porch, watching Lydia arrange Florence Dombey
+in her place in the perambulator.  Her resemblance to Lydia was marked.
+The same dusty gold hair though lighter, the square little shoulders,
+and fine set of the head.  The red balloon tugging at her wrist, her
+soiled little white dress blowing in the summer breeze, she finally
+grew impatient of Lydia's attentions to Florence Dombey.
+
+"Baby eat now," she cried with a stamp of her small foot.
+
+Lydia laughed.  She ran up the steps, took the baby's hand and led her
+through the entry into a square little room, evidently the parlor of
+the home.  It was dusty and disorderly.  The center-table of fine old
+mahogany was littered with pipes and newspapers.  A patent rocker was
+doing duty as a clothes rack for hats and coats.  A mahogany desk was
+almost indistinguishable under a clutter of doll's furniture.  The
+sunset glow pouring through the window disclosed rolls of dust on the
+faded red Brussels carpet.
+
+Lydia disgorged the contents of her blouse upon the desk, then followed
+little Patience into the next room.  This was larger than the first and
+was evidently the dining-room and sitting-room.  A huge old mahogany
+table and sideboard, ill kept and dusty, filled the bow window end of
+the room.  Opposite the sideboard was a couch, draped with a red and
+green chenille spread.  The floor was covered with oil cloth.
+
+A short, stout old woman was setting the table.  She had iron gray
+hair.  Her face was a broad wreath of wrinkles, surrounding
+bespectacled black eyes and a thin mouth that never quite concealed a
+very white and handsome set of false teeth.
+
+"See!  Liz!  See!" cried little Patience, pattering up to the old woman
+with the tugging balloon.
+
+"Ain't that grand!" said Lizzie.  "Where'd you git the money, Lydia?
+Baby's milk's in the tin cup on the kitchen table.  Your father's home.
+You'd better fry the steak.  He complains so about it when I do it."
+
+Lydia left the baby clinging to Lizzie's skirts and went on into the
+kitchen.  Her father was washing his hands at the sink.
+
+"Hello, Dad!" she said.  The child had a peculiar thread of richness in
+her voice when she spoke to little Patience and it was apparent again
+as she greeted the man at the sink.  He turned toward her.
+
+"Well, young woman, it's about time you got home," he said.  "Baby all
+right?"
+
+Lydia nodded and turned toward the litter of dishes and paper parcels
+on the kitchen table.  Amos Dudley at this time was about forty years
+old,--a thin man of medium weight, his brown hair already gray at the
+temples.  Lydia evidently got from him the blue of her eyes and the
+white of her teeth.  He began to peel off a pair of brown overalls.
+
+"What's for supper?" he asked.
+
+"Round steak," said Lydia.
+
+"For heaven's sake, don't let Liz touch it."
+
+"I won't," said the child, piling up dishes deftly.  "I'm going to give
+baby her cup of milk, and then I'll fix it in my patent way."
+
+Amos nodded.  "You're a natural cook, like your mother."  He paused,
+one leg of his overalls off, disclosing his shiny black trousers.
+Lydia carried the cup of milk toward the dining-room.  From where he
+sat he could see her kneel before little Patience, and hold the cup,
+while the baby drank thirstily.  Little motes of the sunset light
+danced on the two curly golden heads.  He looked from the children
+toward the dusty kitchen table.
+
+"What a hell of a mess Liz does keep going," he muttered.  "Patience
+would break her heart, if she knew.  Oh!  Patience, Patience!--"
+
+Lydia came back with the empty cup.  "Now for the steak," she
+exclaimed.  "Gosh, what a fire--"
+
+She attacked the greasy stove with enthusiasm and in a short time a
+savory smell of steak filled the house.  Amos went into the dining-room
+and sat in a rocking chair with little Patience and the balloon in his
+lap.  Old Lizzie hummed as she finished setting the table and Lydia
+whistled as she seasoned the potatoes Lizzie had set to frying.
+
+"Where'd she get the balloon?" asked Amos as Lydia brought in the
+platter of meat.
+
+"Margery gave it to her," answered the child.  "Supper's ready."
+
+"Got it at the circus, I suppose.  I wish I could 'a' let you go,
+Lydia, but at a dollar and a half a day, I swan I--"
+
+"I didn't want to go," returned Lydia, sitting the baby in her high
+chair.  "I'm getting too big for circuses."
+
+"Too big for a circus!"  Her father looked at her with understanding
+eyes.  "I guess heaven is paved with lies like yours, Lydia.  John
+Levine will be over to-night.  Get some of the mess dug out of the
+parlor, will you, Lizzie?"
+
+"Sure," said Lizzie, good-naturedly.  Lydia sat opposite her father and
+poured tea.  The ancient maid of all work sat beside Patience and
+dispensed the currant sauce and the cake.
+
+The baby was half asleep before the meal was ended.  "She didn't finish
+her nap this afternoon," said Lydia.  "I'll take her up to bed now and
+finish my cake afterward."
+
+She tugged the baby out of the high chair that was becoming too close a
+fit and toiled with her up the narrow stairs that led from the entry.
+
+The little sisters slept together in a slant-ceilinged bedroom.  Here
+again was dust and disorder, the floor covered with clothing and toys,
+the bed unmade, the old fashioned mahogany bureau piled high with
+books, brushes, and soiled teacups that had held the baby's milk.
+
+There was still light enough to see by.  Lydia stood Patience on the
+bed and got her into her nightdress after gently persuading the baby to
+let her fasten the balloon to the foot of the bed.  Then she carried
+her to the little rocker by the window and with a look that was the
+very essence of motherhood began to rock the two year old to sleep.
+Presently there floated down to Amos, smoking his pipe on the front
+step, Lydia's childish, throaty contralto:
+
+  "I've reached the land of corn and wine
+  With all its riches surely mine,
+  I've reached that beauteous shining shore,
+  My heaven, my home, for ever more."
+
+A little pause, during which crickets shrilled, then, in a softer voice:
+
+  "Blow him again to me
+  While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps."
+
+Another pause--and still more softly:
+
+  "Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet;
+  Make it from simple flowers
+  Plucked from the lowly valley
+  After the summer showers."
+
+The coolness of the August wind touched Amos' face, "Oh!  Patience,
+Patience--" he murmured.
+
+Lydia sat for a moment or two with the sleeping baby in her arms,
+looking down on her with a curious gentle intentness.  Then she rose
+carefully, and as carefully deposited little Patience on the bed.  This
+done, she untied the balloon and carried it out with her to the little
+landing.  There was a window here into which the August moon was
+beginning to shine.  Lydia sat down with the balloon and felt of it
+carefully.
+
+"Aren't balloons the most wonderful things, almost as wonderful as
+bubbles," she murmured.  "I love the smell of them.  Think what they
+can do, how they can float, better than birds!  How you want to squeeze
+them but you don't dast!  I'd rather have gone to the circus than to
+heaven."
+
+In a moment she heard steps and greetings and her father leading his
+friend into the house.  Then she slipped down the stairs and into the
+night.  A dozen times she ran up and down the yard, the balloon like a
+fettered bird tugging at her wrist.
+
+"I love it as much as little Patience does," she murmured.  "Oh, I wish
+it was mine."
+
+Finally, she ran out of the gate and up the street to the one fine
+house of which the street boasted.  She stole up to the door and
+fastened the string of the balloon to the door bell, gave the bell a
+jerk and fled.
+
+As she ran down the street, a boy, leaning against the gate-post next
+her own, cried, "What's the rush, Lydia?"
+
+"Oh, hello, Kent!  Did you like the circus?"
+
+"The best ever!  You should have taken that ticket I wanted you to.
+Didn't cost me anything but carrying water to the elephants."
+
+"I can't take anything I don't pay for.  I promised mother.  You know
+how it is, Kent."
+
+"I guess your mother fixed it so you'd miss lots of good times, all
+right----  Now, don't fly off the handle--look, I got a trick.  I've
+rubbed my baseball with match heads, so's I can play catch at night.
+Try it?"
+
+"Gosh, isn't that wonderful!" exclaimed Lydia.  The boy, who was a
+little taller than Lydia, led the way to the open space between his
+home and Lydia's.  Then he spun Lydia a brisk ball.
+
+"It's like a shooting star," she cried, spinning back a quick overhand
+shot, "but it makes your hands smell like anything."
+
+"Lydia," called her father from the bow window, "it's time to come in."
+
+"All right!"  Then aside to Kent, "I'll wait till he calls me twice
+more, Kent.  Keep them coming."
+
+"Lydia!"
+
+"Yes, Dad.  Not so hard, Kent.  Don't throw curves, just because I
+can't."
+
+"Lydia!  I shan't call again."
+
+"Coming, Dad!  Good night, Kent.  Face tag!"
+
+"Face tag yourself, smarty.  Maybe I'll be over, to-morrow, if I ain't
+got anything better to do."
+
+Lydia sauntered slowly up to the kitchen steps.  "Well, I haven't
+anything pleasant at all to look forward to now," she thought.  "The
+circus parade is over and I've returned the balloon.  Gee, yes, there
+is too!  I didn't eat my cake yet!"
+
+She turned up the lamp in the kitchen and foraged in the cake box,
+bringing out the cake Lizzie had saved for her.  With this in her hand
+she entered the dining-room.  An extraordinarily long, thin man was
+stretched out in one arm chair, Amos in the other.
+
+"You ought to sit in the parlor, Dad," said Lydia, reproachfully.
+
+"It's too stuffy," said Amos.
+
+"Oh, hello, young Lydia!" said the tall man.  "Come here and let me
+look at you."
+
+Levine drew the child to his knee.  She looked with a clear
+affectionate gaze on his thin smooth-shaven face, and into his tired
+black eyes.
+
+"Why do you always say 'young' Lydia?" asked the child.
+
+"That's what I want to know, too," agreed Amos.
+
+"Because, by heck! she's so young to be such an old lady."  He smoothed
+the short curly hair with a gesture that was indescribably gentle.  "I
+tell you what, young Lydia, if you were ten years older and I were ten
+years younger--"
+
+Lydia leaned against his knee and took a large bite of cake.  "You'd
+take me traveling, wouldn't you, Mr. Levine?" she said, comfortably.
+
+"You bet I would, and you should have your heart's desire, whatever
+that might be.  If any one deserves it you do, young Lydia."
+
+Amos nodded and Lydia looked at them both with a sort of puzzled
+content as she munched her cake.
+
+"I brought a newly illustrated copy of 'Tom Sawyer' for you to see,
+Lydia," said Levine.  "Keep it as long as you want to.  It's over on
+the couch there."
+
+Lydia threw herself headlong on the book and the two men returned to
+the conversation she had interrupted.
+
+"My loan from Marshall comes due in January," said Amos.  "My lord,
+I've got to do something."
+
+"What made you get so much?" asked Levine.
+
+"A thousand dollars?  I told you at the time, I sorta lumped all my
+outstanding debts with the doctor's bill and funeral expenses and
+borrowed enough to cover."
+
+"He's a skin, Marshall is.  Why does he live on this street except to
+save money?"
+
+Lydia looked up from "Tom Sawyer."  There were two little lines of
+worry between her eyes and the little sick sense in the pit of her
+stomach that always came when she heard money matters discussed.  Her
+earliest recollection was of her mother frantically striving to devise
+some method of meeting their latest loan.
+
+"I'd like to get enough ahead to buy a little farm.  All my folks were
+farmers back in New Hampshire and I was a fool ever to have quit it.
+It looked like a mechanic could eat a farmer up, though, when I was a
+young fellow.  Now a little farm looks good enough to me.  But on a
+dollar and a half a day, I swan--"  Amos sighed.
+
+"Land's high around here," said Levine.  "I understand Marshall sold
+Eagle Farm for a hundred dollars an acre.  Takes a sharp farmer to make
+interest on a hundred an acre.  Lord--when you think of the land on the
+reservation twenty miles from here, just yelling for men to farm it and
+nothing but a bunch of dirty Indians to take advantage of it."
+
+"Look here, John," said Amos with sudden energy.  "It's time that bunch
+of Indians moved on and gave white men a chance.  I wouldn't say a word
+if they farmed the land, but such a lazy, lousy outfit!"
+
+"There are more than you feel that way, Amos," replied Levine.  "But it
+would take an Act of Congress to do anything."
+
+"Well, why not an Act of Congress, then?  What's that bunch we sent
+down to Washington doing?"
+
+"Poor brutes of Indians," said John Levine, refilling his pipe.  "I get
+ugly about the reservation, yet I realize they've got first right to
+the land."
+
+"The man that can make best use of the land's got first right to it,"
+insisted Amos.  "That's what my ancestors believed two hundred and
+fifty years ago when they settled in New Hampshire and put loopholes
+under the eaves of their houses.  Our farmhouse had loopholes like
+that.  Snow used to sift in through 'em on my bed when I was a kid."
+
+Lydia, lying on her stomach on the couch, turning the leaves of "Tom
+Sawyer," looked up with sudden interest.
+
+"Daddy, let's go back there to live.  I'd love to live in a house with
+loopholes."
+
+The two men laughed.  "You should have been a boy, Lydia," said Amos.
+
+"A boy," sniffed Levine, "and who'd have mothered little Patience if
+she'd been a boy?"
+
+"That's right--yet, look at that litter on the desk in the parlor."
+
+Both the men smiled while Lydia blushed.
+
+"What are you going to do with that doll furniture, Lydia?" asked John
+Levine.
+
+"I'm going to make a doll house for little Patience, for Christmas."
+Lydia gave an uncomfortable wriggle.  "Don't talk about me so much."
+
+"You're working a long way ahead," commented Amos.  "That was your
+mother's trait.  I wish I'd had it.  Though how I could look ahead on a
+dollar and a half a day--Lydia, it's bedtime."
+
+Lydia rose reluctantly, her book under her arm.
+
+"Don't read upstairs, child," Amos went on; "go to bed and to sleep,
+directly."
+
+Lydia looked around for a safe place for the book and finally climbed
+up on a chair and laid it on the top shelf of the sideboard.  Then she
+came back to her father's side and lifted her face for her good night
+kiss.
+
+"Good night, my child," said Amos.
+
+"How about me," asked Levine.  "Haven't you one to spare for a lonely
+bachelor?"
+
+He pulled Lydia to him and kissed her gently on the cheek.  "If you
+were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"
+
+"Then we'd travel," said the child, with a happy giggle as she ran out
+of the room.
+
+There was silence for a moment, then John Levine said, "Too bad old
+Lizzie is such a slob."
+
+"I know it," replied Amos, "but she gets no wages, just stayed on after
+nursing my wife.  I can't afford to pay for decent help.  And after
+all, she does the rough work, and she's honest and fond of the
+children."
+
+"Still Lydia ought to have a better chance.  I wish you'd let me--" he
+hesitated.
+
+"Let you what?" asked Amos.
+
+"Nothing.  She'd better work out things her own way.  She'll be getting
+to notice things around the house as she grows older."
+
+"It is the devil's own mess here," admitted Amos.  "I'm going to move
+next month.  This place has got on my nerves."
+
+"No, Daddy, no!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Both men started as the little girl appeared in the kitchen door.  "I
+came down to put Florence Dombey to bed," she explained.  "Oh, Daddy,
+don't let's move again!  Why, we've only been here two years."
+
+"I've got to get into a place where I can have a garden," insisted
+Amos.  "If we go further out of town we can get more land for less
+rent."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to move," wailed Lydia.  "Seems to me we've always
+been moving.  Last time you said 'twas because you couldn't bear to
+stay in the house where mother died.  I don't see what excuse you've
+got this time."
+
+"Lydia, go to bed!" cried Amos.
+
+Lydia retreated hastily into the kitchen and in a moment they heard her
+footsteps on the back stairs.
+
+"It's a good idea to have a garden," said John Levine.  "I tell you,
+take that cottage of mine out near the lake.  I'll let you have it for
+what you pay for this.  It'll be empty the first of September."
+
+"I'll go you," said Amos.  "It's as pretty a place as I know of."
+
+Again silence fell.  Then Amos said, "John, why don't you go to
+Congress?  Not to-day, or to-morrow, but maybe four or five years from
+now."
+
+Levine looked at Amos curiously.  The two men were about the same age.
+Levine's brown face had a foreign look about it, the gift of a Canadian
+French grandfather.  Amos was typically Yankee, with the slightly
+aquiline nose, the high forehead and the thin hair, usually associated
+with portraits of Daniel Webster.
+
+"Nice question for one poor man to put to another," said Levine, with a
+short laugh.
+
+"No reason you should always be poor," replied Amos.  "There's rich
+land lying twenty miles north of here, owned by nothing but Indians."
+
+Levine scratched his head.
+
+"You could run for sheriff," said Amos, "as a starter.  You're an Elk."
+
+"By heck!" exploded John Levine.  "I'll try for it.  No reason why a
+real estate man shouldn't go into politics as well as some of the
+shyster lawyers you and I know, huh, Amos?"
+
+Upstairs, Lydia stood in a path of moonlight pulling off her clothes
+slowly and stifling her sobs for the sake of the little figure in the
+bed.  Having jerked herself into her nightdress, she knelt by the
+bedside.
+
+"O God," she prayed in a whisper, "don't let there be any more deaths
+in our family and help me to bring little Patience up right."  This was
+her regular formula.  To-night she added a plea and a threat.  "And O
+God, don't let us move again.  Seems though I can't stand being jerked
+around so much.  If you do, God, I don't know what I'll say to
+you--Amen."
+
+Softly as a shadow she crept in beside her baby sister and the
+moonlight slowly edged across the room and rested for a long time on
+the two curly heads, motionless in childhood's slumber.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE HEROIC DAY
+
+
+"Where the roots strike deepest, the fruitage is best."--_The Murmuring
+Pine_.
+
+
+Little Patience had forgotten the red balloon, overnight.  Lydia had
+known that she would.  Nevertheless, with the feeling that something
+was owing to the baby, she decided to turn this Saturday into an extra
+season of delight for her little charge.
+
+"Do you care, Dad," asked Lydia, at breakfast, "if baby and I have
+lunch over at the lake shore?"
+
+"Not if you're careful," answered Amos.  "By the way," he added, "that
+cottage of John Levine's is right on the shore."  He spoke with studied
+carelessness.  Lydia had a passion for the water.
+
+She stared at him now, with the curiously pellucid gaze that belongs to
+some blue eyed children and Amos had a vague sense of discomfort, as if
+somehow, he were not playing the game quite fairly.  He dug into his
+coat pocket and brought up a handful of tobacco from which he
+disinterred two pennies.
+
+"Here," he said, "one for each of you.  Don't be late for supper,
+chickens."
+
+He kissed the two children, picked up his dinner pail and was off.
+Lydia, her red cheeks redder than usual, smiled at Lizzie, as she
+dropped the pennies into the pocket of her blouse and stuffed a gray
+and frowsy little handkerchief on top of them.
+
+"Isn't he the best old Daddy!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Sure," said Lizzie absentmindedly, as she poured out her third cup of
+coffee.  "Lydia, that dress of yours is real dirty.  You get into
+something else and I'll wash it out to-day."
+
+"I haven't got much of anything else to get into, have I,
+Lizzie?--except my Sunday dress."
+
+"You are dreadful short of clothes, child, what with the way you grow
+and the way you climb trees.  I'm trying to save enough out of the
+grocery money to get you a couple more of them galatea dresses for when
+school opens, but land--your poor mother was such a hand with the
+needle, you used to look a perfect picture.  There," warned by the
+sudden droop of Lydia's mouth, "I tell you, you'll be in and out of the
+water all day, anyhow.  Both of you get into the bathing suits your
+Aunt Emily sent you.  They're wool and it's going to be a dreadful hot
+day."
+
+"Jefful hot day," said little Patience, gulping the last of her oatmeal.
+
+"All right," answered Lydia, soberly.  "Wouldn't you think Aunt Emily
+would have had more sense than to send all those grown up clothes?  Who
+did she think's going to make 'em over, now?"
+
+"I don't know, child.  The poor thing is dead now, anyhow.  Folks is
+always thoughtless about charity.  Why I wasn't taught to sew, I don't
+know.  Anyhow, the bathing suits she got special for you two."
+
+"You bet your life, I'm going to learn how to sew," said Lydia, rising
+to untie the baby's bib.  "I'm practising on Florence Dombey.  Mother
+had taught me straight seams and had just begun me on over and over,
+when--"
+
+"Over and over," repeated the baby, softly.
+
+Lizzie put out a plump, toil-scarred hand and drew Lydia to her.
+"There, dearie!  Think about other things.  What shall poor old Liz fix
+you for lunch?"
+
+The child rubbed her bright cheek against the old woman's faded one.
+"You are a solid comfort to me, Lizzie," she said with a sigh.  Then
+after a moment she exclaimed, eagerly, "Oh!  Lizzie, do you think we
+could have a deviled egg?  Is it too expensive?"
+
+"You shall have a deviled egg if I have to steal it.  But maybe you
+might dust up the parlor a bit while I get things ready."
+
+Lydia established little Patience on the dining-room floor with a linen
+picture book, brought in a broom and dustpan from the kitchen and began
+furiously to sweep the parlor.  When the dust cleared somewhat she
+emerged with the dustpan heaped with sweepings and the corners of the
+room still untouched.  She hung the coats and hats in the entry and
+rubbed off the top of the table with her winter Tam o' Shanter, from
+which the moths flew as she worked.  She gazed thoughtfully at the
+litter on the desk and decided against touching it.  Then with a sense
+of duty well done, she lifted little Patience and carried her up into
+the little bedroom.
+
+The bathing suits were pretty blue woolen things, and when the two
+presented themselves to Lizzie in the kitchen the old woman exclaimed,
+"Well, if ever I seen two fairies!"
+
+"A thin one and a fat one," chuckled Lydia.  "Push the baby carriage
+down over the steps for me, Lizzie, and I'll prepare for our long, hard
+voyage."
+
+Patience was established in her perambulator with her linen picture
+book.  Florence Dombey was settled at her feet, with "Men of Iron."
+The bits of cigar box and the knife packed in a pasteboard box were
+tied to one edge of the carriage.  Patience's milk, packed in a tin
+pail of ice, was laid on top of "Men of Iron."  The paper bag of lunch
+dangled from the handle-bar and Lydia announced the preparations
+complete.
+
+The way to the lake shore led under the maple trees for several blocks.
+Then the board walk turned abruptly to cross a marsh, high-grown now
+with ripening cat-tails.  Having safely crossed the marsh, the walk
+ended in a grass-grown path.  Lydia trundled the heavy perambulator
+with some difficulty along the path.  The August sun was hot.
+
+  "'A life on the ocean wave--'"
+
+she panted.  "You are getting fat, baby!
+
+  'A home on the rolling deep.
+  Where the scattered waters rave
+  And the winds their revels keep.'
+
+Darn it, I wish I had a bicycle!"
+
+"Ahoy there!  Hard aport with your helm, mate!" came a shout from
+behind her.  A boy in a bright red bathing suit jumped off a bicycle.
+
+"Hello, Kent!" said Lydia.
+
+"Hello, yourself!" returned Kent.  "Wait and I'll hitch to the front
+axle."
+
+He untied a stout cord from his handle-bars and proceeded to fasten it
+from his saddle post to the perambulator.  Lydia watched him with a
+glowing face.  She was devoted to Kent, although they quarreled a great
+deal.  He was a handsome boy, two years Lydia's senior; not tall for
+his years, but already broad and sturdy, with crinkly black hair and
+clear, black-lashed brown eyes.  His face was round and ruddy under its
+summer tan.  His lips were full and strong--an aggressive, jolly boy,
+with a quick temper and a generous heart.  He and Lydia had been
+friends since kindergarten days.
+
+"I'm going to stay in the Willows all day," said Lydia.  "Don't go too
+fast, Kent."
+
+"Dit-up!  Dit-up, horsy!" screamed little Patience.
+
+"Toot!  Toot!  Express for the Willows!" shouted Kent, mounting his
+wheel, and the procession was off, the perambulator bounding madly
+after the bicycle, while Patience shouted with delight and Lydia clung
+desperately to the handle-bars.
+
+The path, after a few moments, shifted to the lake shore.  The water
+there lapped quietly on a sandy beach, deep shaded by willows.  Kent
+dismounted.
+
+"Discharge your cargo!" he cried.
+
+"Don't be so bossy," said Lydia.  "This is my party."
+
+"All right, then I won't play with you."
+
+"Nobody asked you to, smarty.  I was going to give you my deviled egg
+for lunch."
+
+"Gosh," said Kent, "did you bring your lunch?  Say, I guess I'll go
+home and get mother to give me some.  But let's play pirates, first."
+
+"All right!  I choose to be chief first," agreed Lydia.
+
+"And I'm the cannibal and baby's the stolen princess," said Kent.
+
+The three children plunged into the game which is the common property
+of childhood.  For a time, bloody captures, savage orgies, escape,
+pursuit, looting of great ships and burial of treasure, transformed the
+quiet shore to a theater of high crime.  At last, as the August noon
+waxed high, and the hostage princess fell fast asleep in her
+perambulator cave, the cannibal, who had shifted to captured duke,
+bowed before the pirate.
+
+"Sir," he said in a deep voice, "I have bethought myself of still
+further treasure which if you will allow me to go after in my trusty
+boat, I will get and bring to you--if you will allow me to say farewell
+at that time to my wife and babes."
+
+"Ha!" returned the pirate.  "How do I know you'll come back?"
+
+The duke folded his arms.  "You have my word of honor which never has,
+and never will, be broken."
+
+"Go, duke--but return ere sundown."  The pirate made a magnificent
+gesture toward the bicycle, "and, say Kent, bring plenty to fill
+yourself up, for I'm awful hungry and I'll need all we've got."
+
+As Kent shot out of sight, Lydia turned to arrange the mosquito bar
+over little Patience, then she stood looking out over the lake.  The
+morning wind had died and the water lay as motionless and perfect a
+blue as the sky above.  Faint and far down the curving shore the white
+dome of the Capitol building rose above soft billows of green tree
+tops.  Up the shore, woods crowned the gentle slopes of the hills.
+Across the lake lay a dim green shore-line of fields.  Lydia gave a
+deep sigh.  The beauty of the lake shore always stirred in her a
+wordless ecstasy.  She waded slowly to her waist into the water, then
+turned gently on her back and floated with her eyes on the sky.  Its
+depth of color was no deeper nor more crystal clear than the depths of
+her own blue gaze.  The tender brooding wonder of the lake was a part
+and parcel of her own little face, so tiny in the wide expanse of water.
+
+After some moments of drifting, she turned on her side and began to
+swim along the shore.  She swam with a power and a precision of stroke
+that a man twice her size would have envied.  But it must be noted that
+she did not get out of eye and ear shot of the perambulator beneath the
+willows; and she had not been swimming long before a curious agitation
+of the mosquito netting brought her ashore.
+
+She wrung the water from her short skirt and was giving little Patience
+her bread and milk, when Kent returned with a paper bag.
+
+"Ma was cross at me for pestering her, but I managed to get some
+sandwiches and doughnuts.  Come on, let's begin.  Gee, there's a squaw!"
+
+Coming toward the three children seated in the sand by the perambulator
+was a thin bent old woman, leaning on a stick.
+
+"Dirty old beggar," said Kent, beginning to devour his sandwiches.
+
+"Isn't she awful!" exclaimed Lydia.  Begging Indians were no novelty to
+Lake City children, but this one was so old and thin that Lydia was
+horrified.  Toothless, her black hair streaked with gray, her calico
+dress unspeakably dirty, her hands like birds' claws clasping her
+stick, the squaw stopped in front of the children.
+
+"Eat!" she said, pointing to her mouth, while her sunken black eyes
+were fixed on Kent's sandwiches.
+
+Little Patience looked up and began to whimper with fear.
+
+"Get out, you old rip!" said Kent.
+
+"Eat!  Eat!" insisted the squaw, a certain ferocity in her manner.
+
+"Did you walk clear in from the reservation?" asked Lydia.
+
+The squaw nodded, and held out her scrawny hand for the children's
+inspection.  "No eats, all time no eats!  You give eats--poor old
+woman."
+
+"Oh, Kent, she's half starved!  Let's give her some of our lunch,"
+exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"Not on your life," returned Kent.  "Dirty, lazy lot!  Why don't they
+work?"
+
+"If we'd go halves, we'd have enough," insisted Lydia.
+
+"You told me you'd only enough for yourself.  Get out of here, you old
+she-devil."
+
+The squaw did not so much as glance at Kent.  Her eyes were fastened on
+Lydia, with the look of a hungry, expectant dog.  Lydia ran her fingers
+through her damp curls, and sighed.  Then she gave little Patience her
+share of the bread and butter and a cooky.  She laid the precious
+deviled egg in its twist of paper on top of the remainder of the bread
+and cookies and handed them to the Indian.
+
+"You can't have any of mine, if you give yours up!" warned Kent.
+
+"I don't want any, pig!" returned Lydia.
+
+The old squaw received the food with trembling fingers and broke into
+sobs, that tore at her old throat painfully.  She said something to
+Lydia in Indian, and then to the children's surprise, she bundled the
+food up in her skirt and started as rapidly as possible back in the
+direction whence she had come.
+
+"She's taking it back to some one," said Kent.
+
+"Poor thing," said Lydia.
+
+"Poor thing!" sniffed Kent.  "It would be a good thing if they were all
+dead.  My father says so."
+
+"Well, I guess your father don't know everything," snapped Lydia.
+
+"Evyfing," said Patience, who had finished her lunch and was digging in
+the sand.
+
+Kent paused in the beginning of his attack on his last sandwich to look
+Lydia over.  She was as thin as a half-grown chicken in her wet bathing
+suit.  Her damp curls, clinging to her head and her eyes a little heavy
+with heat and weariness after her morning of play, made her look
+scarcely older than Patience.  Kent wouldn't confess, even to himself,
+how fond he was of Lydia.
+
+"Here," he said gruffly.  "I can't eat this sandwich.  Mother made me
+too many.  And here's a doughnut."
+
+"Thanks, Kent," said Lydia meekly.  "What do you want to play, after
+lunch?"
+
+"Robinson  Crusoe,"  replied  Kent promptly.  "You'll have to be
+Friday."
+
+As recipient of his bounty, Lydia recognized Kent's advantage and
+conceded the point without protest.
+
+She held Patience's abbreviated bathing suit skirt with one hand.
+"Where are you heading for, baby?" she asked.
+
+"Mardy!  Mardy!" screamed Patience, tugging at her leash.
+
+"Oh, rats, it's Margery Marshall.  Look at the duds on her.  She makes
+me sick," groaned Kent.
+
+"She's crazy about little Patience," answered Lydia, "so I put up with
+a lot from her."
+
+She loosed her hold on Patience.  The baby trundled along the sand to
+meet the little girl in an immaculate white sailor suit, who approached
+pushing a doll buggy large enough to hold Patience.  She ran to meet
+the baby and kissed her, then allowed her to help push the doll
+carriage.
+
+"Mardy tum!  Mardy tum!" chanted Patience.
+
+Margery's black hair was in a long braid, tied with a wide white
+ribbon.  Margery's hands were clean and so were her white stockings and
+shoes.  She brought the doll's carriage to pause before Lydia and Kent
+and gazed at them appraisingly out of bright black eyes--beautiful
+eyes, large and heavily lashed.  Kent's face was dirty and sweat
+streaked.  His red bathing suit was gray with sand and green with grass
+stain.  On his head he wore his favorite headgear, a disreputable white
+cotton cap with the words "Goldenrod Flour Mills" across the front.
+
+"Well," he said belligerently, to Margery, "do you see anything green?"
+
+Margery shrugged her shoulders.  "Watcha playing?"
+
+"Nothing!  Want to play it?" replied Lydia.
+
+"Thanks," answered Margery.  "I'll watch you two while I sit with the
+baby.  Isn't she just ducky in that bathing suit?"
+
+Lydia melted visibly and showed a flash of white teeth.  "You bet!
+How's Gwendolyn?" nodding toward the great bisque doll seated in the
+wonderful doll carriage.  "I wish I had a doll like that."
+
+"She isn't in it with Florence Dombey," said Kent.  "Florence is some
+old sport, she is.  Guess I'd better cut her down."
+
+It was remarkable that while on most occasions Lydia was the tenderest
+of mothers to Florence Dombey, she was, when the fever of "play and
+pretend" was on her, capable of the most astonishing cruelties.  During
+the game of pirates, Florence Dombey had been hung from a willow
+branch, in lieu of a yardarm, and had remained dangling there in the
+wind, forgotten by her mother.
+
+Kent placed her in Patience's carriage.  "I'll tell you what I'll do,"
+he said.  "I'll go up the shore and get Smith's flat boat.  We'll
+anchor it out from the shore, and that'll be the wreck.  We'll swim out
+to her and bring stuff in.  And up under the bank there we'll build the
+cave and the barricade."
+
+"Gee," exclaimed Lydia, "that's the best we've thought of yet.  I'll be
+collecting stuff to put in the wreck."
+
+All during the golden August afternoon the game waxed joyfully.  For a
+long time, Margery sat aloof, playing with the baby.  But when the
+excavating of the cave began, she succumbed, and began to grovel in the
+sand with the other two.  She was allowed to come in as Friday's
+father, and baby Patience, panting at her work of scratching the sand
+with a crooked stick, was entered as the Parrot.  Constant small
+avalanches of sand and soil from the bank powdered the children's hair
+and clothes with gray-black dust.
+
+"Gosh, this is too much like work," groaned Kent, at last.  "I'll tell
+you, let's play the finding of Friday's father."
+
+"I don't want to be tied up in a boat," protested, Margery, at once.
+
+"Mardy not in boat," chorused little Patience, toddling to the water's
+edge and throwing in a handful of sand.
+
+"Isn't she a love!" sighed Margery.
+
+"Huh, you girls make me sick," snorted Kent.  "We won't tie you in the
+boat.  We'll bring the boat in and get you, then we'll anchor it out
+where it is now, and--and--I'll go get Smith's rowboat, and Friday and
+I'll come out and rescue you."
+
+Margery hesitated.  "Aw, come on!" urged Kent.  "Don't be such a 'fraid
+cat.  That's why us kids don't like you, you're such a silly,
+dressed-up doll."
+
+The banker's daughter flushed.  Though she loved the pretty clothes and
+though the sense of superiority to other children, carefully cultivated
+by her mother, was the very breath of her nostrils, she had never been
+quite so happy as this afternoon when grubbing on an equality with
+these three inferior children.
+
+"I'm not afraid at all and I'm just as dirty as Lydia is.  Go ahead
+with your old boat."
+
+They tethered Patience with Kent's cord to one of the willow trees and
+Margery was paddled out several boat lengths from the shore and the
+great stone that served for anchor was dropped over.  Kent took a clean
+dive overboard, swam ashore and disappeared along the willow path.
+Little Patience set up a wail.
+
+"Baby turn too.  Baby turn, too," she wept.
+
+"I'll go stay with her till Kent comes," said Lydia, diving into the
+water as casually as if she were rising from a chair.
+
+"I won't stay in this awful boat alone!" shrieked Margery.
+
+Lydia swam steadily to the shore, then turned.  Margery was standing up
+in the boat.
+
+"Sit down!  Sit down!" cried Lydia.
+
+Margery, beside herself with fear, tossed her arms, "I won't stay in
+this old--"
+
+There was a great splash and a choking cry as Margery's black braid
+disappeared beneath the water.
+
+"And she can't swim," gasped Lydia.  "Kent!" she screamed, and made a
+flying leap into the water.  Her slender, childish arms seemed suddenly
+steel.  Her thin little legs took a racing stroke like tiny propellers.
+Margery came up on the far side of the boat and uttered another choking
+cry before she went down again.  Lydia dived, caught the long black
+braid and brought the frenzied little face to the surface.  Margery
+immediately threw an arm around Lydia's neck, and Lydia hit her in the
+face with a clenched small fist and all the strength she could muster.
+
+"Let go, or I'll let you drown.  Turn over on your back.  There isn't a
+thing to be afraid of."
+
+Margery, with a sob, obeyed and Lydia towed her the short distance to
+the boat.  "There, catch hold," she said.
+
+Both the children clung to the gunwale, Margery choking and sobbing.
+
+"I can't lift you into the boat," panted Lydia.  "But quit your crying.
+You're safe.  There's Kent."
+
+The whole episode had taken but a few minutes.  Kent had heard the call
+and some note of need in it registered, after a moment, in his mind.
+He ran back and leaped into the water.
+
+He clambered into the flat boat and reaching over pulled Margery bodily
+over the gunwale.  The child, sick and hysterical, huddled into the
+bottom of the boat.
+
+"Are you all right, Lyd?" he asked.
+
+"Sure," replied Lydia, who was beginning to recover her breath.
+
+It was the work of a minute to ground the boat.  Then unheeding little
+Patience's lamentations, the two children looked at each other and at
+Margery.
+
+"I'll run for her mother," said Kent.
+
+"And scare her to death!  She isn't hurt a bit," insisted Lydia.
+"Margery, stop crying.  You're all right, I tell you."
+
+"I'll tell you," said Kent, "let's put her in Patience's carriage, and
+carry her home.  The water she swallowed makes her awful sick at her
+stomach, I guess."
+
+The fright over, the old spirit of adventure, with an added sense of
+heroism, animated Kent and Lydia.
+
+Margery was teased out of the boat and assisted into the perambulator,
+with her dripping white legs dangling helplessly over the end.  Little
+Patience's tears were assuaged when she was placed in the doll buggy,
+with Margery's doll in her arms.  Florence Dombey was tied papoose
+fashion to Lydia's back.  The bicycle was hidden in the cave and with
+Kent wheeling Margery and Lydia, Patience, the procession started
+wildly for home.
+
+By the time they had turned into the home street, Margery was beginning
+to recover, but she was still shivering and inclined to sob.  Other
+children followed them and it was quite an imposing group that turned
+in at the Marshall gate, just as Mrs. Marshall came to the door to bid
+a guest good-by.
+
+The scene that followed was difficult for either Lydia or Kent to
+describe afterward.  There was a hullabaloo that brought half the
+mothers of the neighborhood into the yard.  The doctor was sent for.
+Margery was put to bed and Kent and Lydia were mentioned as murderers,
+low-down brats and coarse little brutes by Mrs. Marshall, who ended by
+threatening them with the police.
+
+Old Lizzie appeared on the scene in time to take Lydia's part and Kent
+disappeared after Mrs. Marshall had told him that Margery's father
+would be around to see his father that evening.
+
+"Is the child dead?" demanded old Lizzie, holding Patience on one arm
+while Lydia clung to the other.
+
+"She was able to walk upstairs," said a neighbor.  "It's just Mrs.
+Marshall's way, you know."
+
+"I'll way her," snorted Lizzie.  "Fine thanks to Lydia for saving the
+child.  Come home with your old Liz, dearie, and get into the nice
+clean dress I've got for you."
+
+Lydia told the story to Amos at suppertime.  He was much disturbed.
+
+"I've told you often and often, Lydia, never to endanger a child that
+can't swim.  You and Kent should have had more sense."
+
+The quick tears sprang to the child's eyes.  She was still much shaken.
+
+"Is this lesson enough for you, or must I forbid your playing in the
+water?  I thought I could trust you absolutely."
+
+"Stop your scolding her, Amos Dudley," exclaimed old Lizzie.  "I won't
+have it.  She's too nervous a child."
+
+Amos was saved a reply by a ring at the doorbell.  Lizzie let Margery's
+father in.  He was a short, red-faced man with black hair and eyes.  He
+was too much excited now to stand on ceremony, and he followed Lizzie
+into the dining-room.
+
+"This won't do, Dudley.  These wild young ones of yours--"
+
+"Wait a minute, Marshall," interrupted Amos, with a dignity that he had
+brought with him from New England.  "Margery is all right, so we can go
+over this thing calmly.  Sit down and listen to Lydia's story.  Tell
+him, Lydia."
+
+Lydia left her place and crowded up against her father's side.  Old
+Lizzie was holding the baby.
+
+"It was like this," Lydia began.  "Baby and me were going to play by
+ourselves under the willows.  Then Kent, he came and he played pirates
+with us."
+
+"Why wasn't Kent out playing with the boys?" interrupted Marshall.
+
+Lydia's eyes widened.  "Why, I'm as good as a boy to play with, any
+day!  Mostly he does play with other boys, but when they aren't round,
+he and I play pirates.  And then, right after we'd had our lunch,
+Margery she came along and Kent and I were mad--"
+
+The child paused uncomfortably and rubbed her curly yellow head with
+her thin little hand in an embarrassed way.
+
+"Why were you mad, Lydia?"  In spite of himself, Marshall's voice was
+softening, as Amos had known it would.  Lydia made a deep appeal
+somehow to the tenderness of men.
+
+"Tell Mr. Marshall all you told me, Lydia," said Amos.
+
+"Well--well, you see, it's like this.  Margery's always so _clean_ and
+she has lovely clothes and--and she--she looks down on us other kids so
+we won't generally let her play with us--and she's an awful 'fraid cat
+and--and a tattle-tale.  But when we got to playing Robinson Crusoe,
+and were digging the cave she helped and got terrible dirty, just like
+us, and then she wanted to be Friday's father, and then--well--now--I
+guess the rest of it was Kent's and my fault.  We forgot she couldn't
+swim and we forgot what a cry-baby she was.  'Cause you see, water's
+almost like land to Kent and me and we'd been swimming 'most all day,
+and Margery's the only kid around here that can't swim."
+
+"Why can't she swim?" demanded Marshall.  "How'd all the rest of you
+learn?  Don't you think you were mean not to let her learn?"
+
+Again Lydia's pellucid eyes widened.  "Why her mother won't let her
+play with common kids like us!  And us kids never learned.  We've just
+played in the water ever since we was as big as baby.  She'll be
+swimming by the time she's five," added Lydia, looking at the sleeping
+Patience and speaking with the curious note of richness in her voice.
+
+David Marshall scowled and stirred uncomfortably.  He did not look at
+Amos, who sat with his arm about Lydia, his thin face a lesser replica
+of the old engraving of Daniel Webster hanging on the wall above.
+
+"Well, go on!  How'd she come to fall overboard?"
+
+"She and I was sitting in the boat, and baby, she was tied to a tree by
+a long string and she began to cry to come too, and I jumped over to go
+quiet her.  Kent he'd gone to get another boat.  And Margery she jumped
+up and began to yell and wave her arms and fell overboard.  Then I
+remembered she couldn't swim and I went back and got her and Kent came
+and pulled us in shore.  It wasn't anything, but Margery's such a
+cry-baby.  Lizzie, she's terrible uncomfortable."
+
+Lydia's attention had returned to little Patience.  "I'll take her up
+to bed," she said, "it won't take but a few minutes."
+
+"I'll carry her," said Lizzie.
+
+The baby opened her eyes.  "No, no one cally but Lyd."
+
+"Let Daddy carry you," begged Amos.
+
+Patience's little voice rose to a wail.  "No one cally but Lyd."
+
+"You don't have to be so polite," sniffed Lydia, "I carry her all the
+time."
+
+She lifted the sleepy baby easily and Patience dropped her soft cheek
+against Lydia's and closed her eyes again.  Lydia turned to Marshall.
+Her face was very serious.
+
+"I know I was awful bad, Mr. Marshall, and maybe you feel as if you
+ought to lick me."
+
+"Put your little sister to bed," said Marshall gravely, "and then we'll
+see."
+
+There was silence in the room for a moment after Lydia left it, then
+Amos said, "I'll be glad to do anything I can, Marshall."
+
+"Neither of you'll lay a finger on Lydia," interrupted Lizzie.  "If you
+want to lick any one, go lick Elviry Marshall, the fool!  Why, I knew
+her when she was my niece's hired girl and you, Dave Marshall, was
+selling cans of tomatoes over a counter.  And she's bringing that young
+one up to be a silly little fool.  Mark my words, she'll be the prey of
+the first fortune-hunter that comes along."
+
+To Amos's surprise, Marshall only scowled at Lizzie, who now began to
+remove the supper dishes, talking in a whisper to herself.  She paused
+once in front of Marshall with the teapot in one hand and the milk
+pitcher in the other.
+
+"Coming and going with your nose in the air, Dave, I suppose you never
+notice Lydia, but you've had a good look at her to-night, and mind well
+what I mean when I say you know as well as I that children like Lydia
+are rare and that your young one ought to consider it a privilege to be
+pulled out of the water by her."
+
+Old Lizzie pounded out of the room and there was a clatter of dishes
+that ably expressed her frame of mind.  Above the clatter and down from
+the children's bedroom floated Lydia's little contralto lilt:
+
+  "Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet;
+  Make it from simple flowers
+  Plucked from the lowly valley
+  After the summer showers."
+
+Neither Amos nor his caller spoke.  In a few minutes Lydia's step
+sounded on the stairs.  The last of the sunset glow caught her hair,
+and the fine set of her head on her square little shoulders was never
+more pronounced than as she walked slowly toward Dave Marshall.
+
+"I never had a licking," she said, "but I guess I deserve one and so
+you'd better do it and get it done, Mr. Marshall."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE COTTAGE
+
+
+"The young pine knows the secrets of the ground.  The old pine knows
+the stars."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Marshall cleared his throat and reaching out, took Lydia by the arm and
+pulled her toward him.  He could feel her muscles stiffen under his
+touch.  The bright red color left her cheeks.
+
+"I wouldn't think much of your father, my child," he said, huskily, "if
+he let me whip you, even if I wanted to."
+
+Lydia took a quick look up into his face.  Then she gave a little
+gasping sigh, her lips quivered and she leaned against his knee.
+
+"Look here, Lydia," said Dave Marshall, "this is to be your punishment.
+I want you and Kent to teach Margery how to swim and how to get dirty,
+see?  Let her play with you 'common kids,' will you?"
+
+"Will her mother let her?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Yes," answered Dave, grimly.
+
+"All right," said Lydia, with a little sigh.
+
+"I know it'll be a hard job," Marshall interpreted the sigh quickly;
+"that's where the punishment comes in."
+
+"Lydia'll do it.  I'll see to it," said Amos.
+
+"You keep out, Dudley.  This is between Lydia and me.  How about it,
+Lydia?"
+
+"If you'll boss her mother, I'll boss Margery and Kent," said Lydia,
+with a sudden laugh.
+
+"It's a bargain."  Marshall rose.  "Good night, Dudley."
+
+"Good night, Marshall."
+
+Amos followed his caller to the door.  As he did so Lydia heard Kent's
+whistle in the back yard.  She joined him and the two withdrew to a
+bench behind the woodshed.
+
+"I saw him through the window," said Kent, in a low voice.  "What's he
+going to do to us?  Dad's licked me, so that much is done."
+
+Lydia told of their punishment.  "Darn it," groaned Kent, "I'd rather
+had another licking.  I certainly do hate that girl."
+
+"So do I," agreed Lydia.
+
+The two sat staring into the summer twilight.  "Anyhow," said Lydia, "I
+hit her an awful smack in the face to-day.  Of course, I had to, but
+that's why her nose bled so."
+
+"I wish you'd busted her old snoot," grumbled Kent.  "She's always
+turning it up at everybody.  We saved somebody's life to-day, by golly,
+and you'd think we'd committed a crime."
+
+Lydia sighed.  "Nothing to look forward to but worry now.  O gee, Kent,
+I've got two pennies!  One's Patience's.  But let's go spend the other
+at Spence's!"
+
+"Gum or all day sucker?" asked Kent, who, in spite of the fact that he
+owned a second-hand bicycle, was not above sharing a penny.
+
+"Gum lasts longer," suggested Lydia.
+
+"What kinda gum, spruce or white or tutti-frutti?"
+
+"You can choose."
+
+"Spruce then.  It makes the most juice.  Come on, Lyd, before you're
+called in."
+
+And thus ended the heroic day.
+
+No one ever knew what Dave Marshall said to Elviry, his wife, but a day
+or so after, little Margery, in a fine white flannel bathing suit,
+appeared on the sand, about a quarter of a mile below the Willows.
+Here any bright day from the last of June to the first week in
+September, a dozen children might be found at play in and out of the
+water.  There was usually a mother or an older sister somewhere about,
+but it was to be noted that Mrs. Marshall never appeared.  Margery came
+and went with Lydia.
+
+Kent was a quitter!  After the rescue he decided to eschew the society
+of girls forever and he struck a bargain with Lydia that she could have
+the use of his bicycle one day a week till snow came if she would
+undertake the disciplining of the banker's daughter alone.  For such a
+bribe Lydia would have undertaken to teach Elviry Marshall, herself, to
+swim--and so the bargain was struck.
+
+Margery, it was quickly discovered, sousing in the water with the other
+children was quite "a common kid" herself and though there seemed to be
+an inherent snobbishness in the little girl that returned to her as
+soon as she was dried and clothed, in her bathing suit she mucked about
+and screamed and quarreled as did the rest.
+
+Lydia's method of teaching was one employed by most of the children of
+Lake City when a new child moved into the town.  She forced Margery to
+float face downward in the water, again and again, while she counted
+ten.  After one afternoon of this, the banker's daughter had forever
+lost her fear of the water and the rest was easy.
+
+In spite of the relationship Dave Marshall had established between the
+two children, Margery and Lydia did not like each other.  One Saturday
+afternoon, after banking hours, Marshall was seated on his front porch,
+with Elviry and Margery, when Lydia appeared.  She stood on the steps
+in her bathing suit, her bare feet in a pair of ragged "sneakers."  Her
+face and hands and ankles were dirty but her eyes and the pink of her
+cheeks were clear.
+
+"Come on, Marg," said Lydia, "and, Mr. Marshall, please, won't you come
+too and see how well she does it?"
+
+"Run and get into your bathing suit, daughter," said Marshall.
+"Elviry, want to come?"
+
+"No," snapped Elviry.  "Lydia, how do you manage to get so dirty, when
+to my positive knowledge, you're in the water an hour every day?"
+
+Lydia blushed and tried to hide one ankle behind the other.  "I think
+you're terrible impolite," she murmured.
+
+Dave roared with laughter.  "Right you are, Lydia!  I guess I'll have
+to hitch up and drive us all over."
+
+They drove to the Willows and Margery went through her paces, while her
+father watched and applauded from the shore.  When they had finished
+and had run up and down to warm up and dry off and were driving home,
+Dave said,
+
+"You'd better come in to supper with us, Lydia."
+
+"No, thank you," answered the child.  "Mr. Levine's coming to supper at
+our house and I have to cook it."
+
+"Hum!  What does John Levine do at your house, so much?"
+
+"Oh, he's going into politics," answered Lydia, innocently, "and Dad
+advises him."
+
+"Well, tell them you've done a fine job as a swimming teacher," Dave
+spoke carelessly.  "I don't see why Levine wants to get into politics.
+He's doing well in real estate."
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Lydia, with a child's importance at having real news to
+impart, "he's going into politics so's to get some Indian land."
+
+"Like hell he is!" exclaimed Marshall.
+
+"Oh, Daddy!" Margery's voice was exactly like her mother's.
+
+They were turning into the Marshall driveway and Marshall's face was a
+curious mixture of amusement and irritation.  He kissed his little
+daughter when he lifted her from the buggy and bade her run to the
+house.  Before he lifted Lydia down he paused and as he stood on the
+ground and she sat in the surrey, she looked levelly into his black
+eyes.
+
+"I wish I had another little daughter like you, Lydia," he said.  "I
+don't see why--but God, you can't get swans from barnyard fowl."  He
+continued to study Lydia's face.  "Some day, my child, you'll make some
+man's heart break, or lift him up to heaven."
+
+Lydia squirmed.
+
+"Well, Margery's taught now," she said hastily, "so I don't have to be
+punished any more, do I?"
+
+Marshall scowled slightly.  "What do you mean?  Don't you want Margery
+to play with you?"
+
+"Oh, sure, she can play, if she wants to, but I mean I don't have to go
+get her and bring her into our games."
+
+"No," said Dave slowly, "but I think it would be nice of you to sort of
+keep an eye on her and get her dirty once in a while.  There!  Run
+home, child, you're shivering."
+
+With puzzled eyes, Lydia obeyed.
+
+The most important result, as far as Lydia was interested, of the talk
+between her father and Levine that night was that Amos decided
+definitely to move the following week.  Lydia cried a little over it,
+reproached God in her prayers and then with a child's resignation to
+the inevitability of grown up decision, she began to say good-by to the
+neighborhood children and to help old Lizzie to pack.
+
+Lydia did not see the new home until she rode out with the first
+dray-load of furniture.  She sat in the high seat beside the driver,
+baby Patience in her lap, her thin, long little legs dangling, her
+cheeks scarlet with excitement and the warmth of a hot September
+morning.  The cottage was a mile from the old home.  They drove along
+the maple shaded street for the first half of the distance, then turned
+into a dirt road that led toward the lake shore.  The dirt road emerged
+on the shore a half mile above the Willows and wound along a high
+embankment, crowned with oaks.
+
+"Whoa!" shouted the driver.
+
+"Oh, isn't it pretty!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+An old-fashioned white cottage, with green blinds and a tiny front
+porch, stood beside the road, its back to the lake.  There were five
+acres or so of ground around the house, set off by a white picket
+fence.  At the gate a pine tree stood.  There were oaks and lilac
+bushes in the front yard.  Through the leaves, Lydia saw the blue of
+the lake.
+
+"Our yard runs right down to the water!" she cried, as the driver
+lifted the baby down and she followed after.  "Gee!  I'm glad we moved!"
+
+"It is a nice little spot," said the driver, "but kinda lonely."  He
+set the perambulator inside the fence, then balanced the dining-room
+table on his head and started up the path to the door.
+
+Lydia looked along the road, where an occasional house was to be seen.
+
+"I hope kids live in those houses," she said, "but if they don't, baby
+and the lake are company enough for me, and Kent can come out on his
+wheel."
+
+She strapped Patience into the perambulator, then ran up to the house.
+The front door gave directly into a living-room of good proportions.
+Out of this folding doors led into a small dining-room and beyond this
+a kitchen of generous size with a wonderful view of the glimmering lake
+from its rear windows.  A comfortable-sized bedroom opened off each of
+these rooms.  Lydia ran through the little house eagerly.  It was full
+of windows and being all on one floor, gave a fine effect of
+spaciousness.  It was an old house but in excellent repair as was all
+John Levine's property.
+
+"I'm going to have the bedroom off the kitchen, 'cause you can see the
+lake from it," she told the driver.
+
+"It'll be colder'n charity in the winter.  Better take the middle one,"
+he remarked, setting the kitchen stove down with a bang.
+
+"No, old Lizzie'll want to have that.  Well, I'll begin to get things
+settled."
+
+Lizzie arrived on the third and final load.  She brought with her a
+lunch that they shared with the driver.  He good-naturedly set up the
+kitchen stove and the three beds for them and departed with the hope
+that they would not be too lonesome.
+
+Lydia and old Lizzie put in an afternoon of gigantic effort.  By six
+o'clock, the beds were made, dishes unpacked and in the china closet,
+the table was set for supper and an Irish stew of Lydia's make was
+simmering on the stove.
+
+When Amos came up the path at a half after six, his dinner pail in his
+hand, he found Lydia flat on her back on the little front porch.  Her
+curly head was wet with perspiration; face, hands and blouse were
+black.  The baby sat beside her, trying to get Florence Dombey to sleep.
+
+"Well," said Amos, looking down on his family, "how do you like it,
+Lydia?"
+
+"It's great!  My back's broken!  Supper's ready."
+
+"You shouldn't lift heavy things, child!  How often have I told you?
+Wait until I get home."
+
+"I want to get things done," replied Lydia, "so's I can do a little
+playing before school opens.  Come on in and see all we've done, Daddy."
+
+She forget her aching back and led the way into the house.  Amos was as
+excited and pleased as the children and Lizzie, so tired that her old
+hands shook, was as elated as the others.
+
+"It's much more roomy than the old house and all on one floor.  'Twill
+save me the stairs.  And the garden'll be fine," she said, failing to
+call attention to the fact that the water was far from the house and
+that there was no kitchen sink.
+
+"We've got to try to keep this place cleaner than we did the other,"
+said Amos.  "Lydia, better wash up for supper."
+
+"Oh, Daddy," said Lydia, "I'm too tired!  Don't make me!"
+
+"All right," answered Amos, "but your mother was always clean and so am
+I.  I don't see where you get it."
+
+"Maybe one of my ancestors was a garbage man," suggested Lydia, sliding
+into her place at the table.
+
+She allowed Lizzie to carry Patience into their bedroom after supper
+and Amos, smoking in the yard and planning the garden for next year,
+waited in vain to hear "Beulah Land" and "Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet"
+float to him from the open window.
+
+"Where's Lydia, Lizzie?" he asked as the old lady came out to empty the
+dish water.
+
+"She ain't come out yet.  Maybe she's fell asleep too."
+
+The two tip-toed to the window.  On the bed under the covers was little
+Patience, fast asleep, and beside her, on top of the covers, fully
+dressed, lay Lydia, an arm across her little sister, in the sleep of
+utter exhaustion.
+
+"I'll just take her shoes off and cover her and leave her till
+morning," said Lizzie.
+
+But Amos, gazing at his two ill-kempt little daughters, at the chaotic
+room, did not answer except to murmur to himself, "Oh, Patience!
+Patience!"
+
+The cottage was somewhat isolated.  Amos was three quarters of a mile
+from his work.  The schoolhouse was a mile away and the nearest
+trolley, which Lizzie must take to do the family shopping, was half a
+mile back along the dirt road.
+
+Nevertheless, all the family felt that they had taken a distinct step
+upward in moving into lake shore property and nobody complained of
+distances.  Amos began putting in his Sundays in cleaning up the
+bramble-grown acres he intended to turn into a garden in the spring.
+He could not afford to have it plowed so he spaded it all himself,
+during the wonderful bright fall Sabbaths.  Nor was this a hardship for
+Amos.  Only the farm bred can realize the reminiscent joy he took in
+wrestling with the sod, which gave up the smell that is more deeply
+familiar to man than any other in the range of human experience.
+
+A dairy farmer named Norton, up the road, gave him manure in exchange
+for the promise of early vegetables for his table.  After his spading
+was done in late September, Amos, with his wheelbarrow, followed by the
+two children, began his trips between the dairy farm and his garden
+patch and he kept these up until the garden was deep with fertilizer.
+
+There never had been a more beautiful autumn than this.  There was
+enough rain to wet down the soil for the winter, yet the Sundays were
+almost always clear.  Fields and woods stretched away before the
+cottage, crimson and green as the frosts came on.  Back of the cottage,
+forever gleaming through the scarlet of the autumn oaks, lay the lake,
+where duck and teal were beginning to lodge o' nights, in the
+rice-fringed nooks along the shore.
+
+Lydia was happier than she had been since her mother's death.  She took
+the long tramps to and from school, lunch box and school bag slung at
+her back, in a sort of ecstasy.  She was inherently a child of the
+woods and fields.  Their beauty thrilled her while it tranquilized her.
+Some of the weight of worry and responsibility that she had carried
+since her baby sister of two weeks had been turned over to her care
+left her.
+
+Kent was enchanted with the new home.  Football was very engrossing,
+yet he managed to get out for at least one visit a week.  He and Lydia
+discovered a tiny spring in the bank above the lake and they began at
+once to dam it in and planned a great series of ditches and canals.
+
+The doll's furniture was finished by October and Lydia began work on
+the doll's house.
+
+One Saturday afternoon early in October she was established on the
+front steps with her carpentry when a surrey stopped at the gate.
+Little Patience, in a red coat, rolled to her feet.  She had been
+collecting pebbles from the gravel walk.
+
+"Mardy!" she screamed.  "Baby's Mardy!" and started down the walk to
+meet Margery and her father.
+
+"Darn it," said Lydia to herself.  "Hello, Marg!  How de do, Mr.
+Marshall."
+
+"Well!  Well!"  Dave Marshall lifted the tails of his light overcoat
+and sat down on the steps.  "Gone into house building, eh, Lydia?  Did
+you do it all yourself?  Gee! that's not such a bad job."
+
+Lydia had the aptitude of a boy for tools.  On one end of the cracker
+box was a V-shaped roof.  There were two shelves within, making three
+floors, and Lydia was now hard at work with a chisel and jackknife
+hacking out two windows for each floor.
+
+She stood, chisel in hand, her red coat sleeves rolled to her elbows,
+her curly hair wind-tossed, staring at Marshall half proudly, half
+defiantly.
+
+Dave laughed delightedly.  "Lydia, any time your father wants to sell
+you, I'm in the market."  He looked at the nails hammered in without a
+crack or bruise in the wood, then laughed again.
+
+"Get your and the baby's hats, Lydia.  We stopped to take you for a
+ride."
+
+Lydia's eyes danced, then she shook her head.  "I can't!  The bread's
+in baking and I'm watching it."
+
+"Where's Lizzie?"
+
+"She went in town to do the marketing!  Darn it!  Don't I have awful
+luck?"
+
+Lydia sighed and looked from baby Patience and Margery, walking up and
+down the path, to Mrs. Marshall, holding the reins.
+
+"Well, anyhow," she said, with sudden cheerfulness, "Mrs. Marshall'll
+be glad I'm not coming, and some day, maybe you'll take me when she
+isn't with you."
+
+Dave started to protest, then the polite lie faded on his lips.  Lydia
+turned her pellucid gaze to his with such a look of mature
+understanding, that he ended by nodding as if she had indeed been grown
+up, and rising, said, "Perhaps you're right.  Good-by, my dear.  Come,
+Margery."
+
+Lydia stood with the baby clinging to her skirts.  There were tears in
+her eyes.  Sometimes she looked on the world that other children lived
+in, with the wonder and longing of a little beggar snub-nosed against
+the window of a French pastry shop.
+
+John Levine came home with Amos that night to supper.  Amos felt safe
+about an unexpected guest on Saturday nights for there was always a pot
+of baked beans, at the baking of which Lizzie was a master hand, and
+there were always biscuits.  Lydia was expert at making these.  She had
+taken of late to practising with her mother's old cook book and Amos
+felt as if he were getting a new lease of gastronomic life.
+
+"Well," said Levine, after supper was finished, the baby was asleep and
+Lydia was established with a copy of "The Water Babies" he had brought
+her, "I had an interesting trip, this week."
+
+Amos tossed the bag of tobacco to Levine.  "Where?"
+
+"I put in most of the week on horseback up on the reservation.  Amos,
+the pine land up in there is something to dream of.  Why, there's
+nothing like it left in the Mississippi Valley, nor hasn't been for
+twenty years.  Have you ever been up there?"
+
+Amos shook his head.  "I've just never had time.  It's a God-awful
+trip.  No railroad, twenty-mile drive--"
+
+Levine nodded.  "The Indians are in awful bad shape up there.  Agent's
+in it for what he can get, I guess.  Don't know as I blame him.  The
+sooner the Indians are gone the better it'll be for us and all
+concerned."
+
+"What's the matter with 'em?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Consumption--some kind of eye disease--starvation--"
+
+The child shivered and her eyes widened.
+
+"You'd better go on with the 'Water Babies,'" said John.  "Has Tom
+fallen into the river yet?"
+
+"No, he's just seen himself in the mirror," answered Lydia, burying her
+nose in the delectable tale again.
+
+"It's a wonderful story," said Levine, his black eyes reminiscent.
+
+  "'Clear and cool, clear and cool,
+  By laughing shallow and dreaming pool;
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+  Undefiled, for the undefiled;
+  Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child.'
+
+It has some unforgettable verse in it.  Well, as I was saying, Amos,
+that timber isn't going to stay up there and rot--_because, I'm going
+to get it out of there_!"
+
+"How?" asked Amos.
+
+"Act of Congress, maybe.  Maybe a railroad will get a permit to go
+through, eh?  There are several ways.  We'll die rich, yet, Amos."
+
+Amos pulled at his pipe and shook his head.  "You will but I won't.  It
+isn't in our blood."
+
+"Shucks, Amos.  Where's your nerve?"
+
+Amos looked at Levine silently for a moment.  Then he said huskily,
+
+"My nerve is gone with Patience.  And if she isn't in heaven, there
+isn't one, that's all."
+
+Lydia looked up from her story with a quick flash of tragedy in her
+eyes.
+
+"Well," said John, smiling at her gently, "if you don't want to be
+rich, Amos, Lydia does.  I'll give her the cottage here, the first
+fifty thousand I make off of Indian pine lands."
+
+"I swan," exclaimed Amos, "if you do that, I'll buy a cow and a pig and
+some chickens and I can pretty near make a living right here."
+
+"You're foolish, Amos.  This isn't New England.  This is the West.  All
+you've got to do is to keep your nerve, and any one with sense can make
+a killing.  Opportunity screams at you."
+
+"I guess she's always on my deaf side," said Amos.
+
+"When I grow up," said Lydia, suddenly, "I'm going to buy a ship and
+sail to Africa and explore the jungles."
+
+"I'll go with you, Lydia,", exclaimed Levine, "hanged if I don't sell
+my Indian lands for real money, and go right along with you."
+
+"Mr. Marshall says 'like Hell you'll get some Indian lands,'" mused the
+child.
+
+Both men exclaimed together, "What!"
+
+Lydia was confused but repeated her conversation with Marshall.
+
+"So that's the way the wind blows," said Levine.
+
+"You don't think for a minute there's a banker in town without one hand
+on the reservation," said Amos.  "Lydia, you're old enough now not to
+repeat conversations you hear at home.  Don't you ever tell anybody the
+things you hear me and Mr. Levine talk over.  Understand?" sharply.
+
+"Yes, Daddy," murmured Lydia, flushing painfully.
+
+"You don't have to jaw the child that way, Amos."  Levine's voice was
+impatient.  "Just explain things to her.  Why do you want to humiliate
+her?"
+
+Amos gave a short laugh.  "Takes a bachelor to bring up kids.  Run
+along to bed, Lydia."
+
+"Lydia's not a kid.  She's a grown-up lady in disguise," said Levine,
+catching her hand as she passed and drawing her to him.  "Good night,
+young Lydia!  If you were ten years older and I were ten years
+younger--"
+
+Lydia smiled through tear-dimmed eyes.  "We'd travel!" she said.
+
+Cold weather set in early this year.  Before Thanksgiving the lake was
+ice-locked for the winter.  The garden was flinty, and on Thanksgiving
+Day, three inches of snow fell.  The family rose in the dark.  Amos,
+with his dinner pail, left the house an hour before Lydia and the sun
+was just flushing the brown tree tops when she waved good-by to little
+Patience, whose lovely little face against the window was the last
+thing she saw in the morning, the first thing she saw watching for her
+return in the dusk of the early winter evening.
+
+Amos, always a little moody and a little restless, since the children's
+mother had gone to her last sleep, grew more so as the end of the year
+approached.  It was perhaps a week before Christmas on a Sunday
+afternoon that he called Lydia to him.  Patience was having her nap and
+Lizzie had gone to call on Mrs. Norton.
+
+Lydia, who was re-reading "The Water Babies," put it down reluctantly
+and came to her father's side.  Her heart thumped heavily.  Her
+father's depressed voice meant just one thing--money trouble.
+
+He was very gentle.  He put his hand on the dusty yellow of her hair.
+He was very careful of the children's hair.  Like many New England farm
+lads he was a jack of all trades.  He clipped Lydia's hair every month
+himself.
+
+"Your hair will be thick enough in another year, so's I won't have to
+cut it any more, Lydia.  It's coming along thick as felt.  Wouldn't
+think it was once thin, now."
+
+Lydia eyed her father's care-lined face uneasily.  Amos still hesitated.
+
+"Where'd you get that dress, my dear?" he asked.
+
+"Lizzie and I made it of that one of mother's," answered the child.
+"It isn't made so awful good, but I like to wear it, because it was
+hers."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Amos absently.
+
+The dress was a green serge, clumsily put together as a sailor suit,
+and the color fought desperately with the transparent blue of the
+little girl's eyes.
+
+"Lydia," said her father abruptly.  "You're a big girl now.  You asked
+for skates and a sled for Christmas.  My child, I don't see how you
+children are going to have anything extra for Christmas, except perhaps
+a little candy and an orange.  That note with Marshall comes due in
+January.  By standing Levine off on the rent, I can rake and scrape the
+interest together.  It's hopeless for me even to consider meeting the
+note.  What Marshall will do, I don't know.  If I could ever get on my
+feet--with the garden.  But on a dollar and a half a day, I swan--"
+
+"No Christmas at all?" quavered Lydia.  "Won't we even hang up our
+stockings?"
+
+"If you'll be contented just to put a little candy in them.  Come,
+Lydia, you're too big to hang up your stocking, anyhow."
+
+Lydia left her father and walked over to the window.  She pressed her
+face against the pane and looked back to the lake.  The sun was sinking
+in a gray rift of clouds.  The lake was a desolate plain of silvery
+gold touched with great shadows of purple where snow drifts were high.
+As she looked, the weight on her chest lifted.  The trembling in her
+hands that always came with the mention of money lessened.  The child,
+even as early as this, had the greatest gift that life bestows, the
+power of deriving solace from sky and hill and sweep of water.
+
+"Anyhow," she said to her father, "I've still got something to look
+forward to.  I've got the doll house to give baby, and Mr. Levine
+always gives me a book for Christmas."
+
+"That's a good girl!"  Amos gave a relieved sigh, then went on with his
+brooding over his unlighted pipe.
+
+And after all, this Christmas proved to be one of the high spots of
+Lydia's life.  She had a joyous 24th.  All the morning she spent in the
+woods on the Norton farm with her sled, cutting pine boughs.  As she
+trudged back through the farmyard, Billy Norton called to her.
+
+"Oh, Lydia!"
+
+Lydia stopped her sled against a drift and waited for Billy to cross
+the farmyard.  He was a large, awkward boy several years older than
+Lydia.  He seemed a very homely sort of person to her, yet she liked
+his face.  He was as fair as Kent was dark.  Kent's features were
+regular and clean-cut.  Billy's were rough hewn and irregular, and his
+hair and lashes were straight and blond.
+
+What Lydia could not at this time appreciate was the fact that Billy's
+gray eyes were remarkable in the clarity and steadiness of their gaze,
+that his square jaw and mobile mouth were full of fine promise for his
+manhood and that even at sixteen the framework of his great body was
+magnificent.
+
+He never had paid any attention to Lydia before and she was bashful
+toward the older boys.
+
+"Say, Lydia, want a brace of duck?  A lot of them settled at Warm
+Springs last night and I've got more than I can use."
+
+He leaned his gun against the fence and began to separate two birds
+from the bunch hanging over his shoulder.
+
+Lydia began to breathe quickly.  The Dudleys could not afford a special
+Christmas dinner.
+
+"I--I don't know how I could pay you, Bill--"
+
+"Who wants pay?" asked Bill, indignantly.
+
+"I dasn't take anything without paying for it," returned Lydia, her
+eyes still on the ducks.  "But I'd--I'd rather have those than a ship."
+
+Billy's clear gaze wandered from Lydia's thin little face to her
+patched mittens and back again.
+
+"Won't your father let you?" he asked.
+
+"I won't let myself," replied the little girl.
+
+"Oh!" said Billy, his gray eyes deepening.  "Well, let me have the
+evergreens and you go back for some more.  It'll save me getting Ma
+hers."
+
+With one thrust of her foot Lydia shoved the fragrant pile of boughs
+into the snow.  She tied the brace of duck to the sled and started back
+toward the wood, then paused and looked back at Billy.
+
+"Thank you a hundred times," she called.
+
+"It was a business deal.  No thanks needed," he replied.
+
+Lydia nodded and trudged off.  The boy stood for a moment looking at
+the little figure, then he started after her.
+
+"Lydia, I'll get that load of pines for you."
+
+She tossed a vivid smile over her shoulder.  "You will not.  It's a
+business deal."
+
+And Billy turned back reluctantly toward the barn.
+
+In an hour Lydia was panting up the steps into the kitchen.  Lizzie's
+joy was even more extreme than Lydia's.  She thawed the ducks out and
+dressed them, after dinner, with the two children standing so close as
+at times seriously to impede progress.
+
+"I'm lucky," said Lydia.  "There isn't anybody luckier than I am or has
+better things happen to 'em than I do.  I'd rather be me than a water
+baby."
+
+"Baby not a water baby.  Baby a duck," commented Patience, her hands
+full of bright feathers.
+
+"Baby is a duck," laughed Lydia.  "Won't Daddy be glad!"
+
+Amos was glad.  Plodding sadly home, he was greeted by three glowing
+faces in the open door as soon as his foot sounded on the porch.  The
+base burner in the living-room was clear and glowing.  The dining-room
+was fragrant with pine.  He was not allowed to take off his overcoat,
+but was towed to the kitchen where the two birds, trussed and stuffed
+for the baking, were set forth on the table.
+
+"I got 'em!" shouted Lydia.  "I got 'em off Billy Norton for a load of
+pine.  Christmas present for you, Daddy, from yours truly, Lydia!"  She
+seized the baby's hands and the two did a dance round Amos, shouting,
+"Christmas present!  Christmas present!" at the top of their lungs.
+
+"Well!  Well!" exclaimed Amos.  "Isn't that fine!  If Levine comes out
+to-morrow we can ask him to dinner, after all.  Can't we, Lizzie?"
+
+"You bet we can!" said Lizzie.  "And look at this.  I was going to keep
+it for a surprise.  I made it by your wife's recipe."
+
+She held an open Mason jar under Amos' nose.
+
+"Mince meat!" he exclaimed.  "Why, Lizzie, where'd you get the makings?"
+
+"Oh, a bit here and a bit there for the last two months.  Ain't it
+grand?" offering a smell to each of the children, who sniffed
+ecstatically.
+
+When the baby was safely asleep, Lydia appeared with two stockings
+which she hung on chair backs by the stove in the living-room.
+
+"I'm putting them up to hold the candy," she explained to her father,
+suggestively.
+
+He rose obediently and produced half a dozen oranges and a bag of candy.
+
+"Oh, that's gorgeous," cried Lydia, whose spirits to-night were not to
+be quenched.  She brought in the doll house.
+
+"See, Daddy," she said, with the pride of the master builder.  "I
+colored it with walnut juice.  And I found the wall paper in the attic."
+
+Amos got down on his knees and examined the tiny rooms and the cigar
+box furniture.  He chuckled delightedly.  "I swan," he said, "if
+Patience doesn't want it you can give it to me!"
+
+"I'm going to let Lizzie put the candy in the stockings," mused Lydia,
+"then I'll have that to look forward to.  I'm going to bed right now,
+so morning will come sooner."
+
+Alone with the stockings, into which Lizzie put the candy and oranges,
+Amos sat long staring at the base burner.  Without, the moon sailed
+high.  Wood snapping in the intense cold was the only sound on the
+wonder of the night.  Something of the urgent joy and beauty of the Eve
+touched Amos, for he finally rose and said,
+
+"Well, I've got two fine children, anyhow."  Then he filled up the
+stoves for the night and went to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RAVISHED NEST
+
+
+"The young pine bends to the storm.  The old pine breaks."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+It would be difficult to say which enjoyed the doll house more, Lydia
+or Patience.  It would be difficult to say which one was the more
+touched, Lizzie or Amos by the package each found on the breakfast
+table.  Amos unwrapped his to find therein a pipe tray fashioned from
+cigar box wood and stained with Lydia's walnut dye.  Lizzie's gift was
+a flat black pin-cushion, with "Lizzie, with love from Lydia,"
+embroidered crazily on it in red.  Florence Dombey showed no emotion
+over her gift, a string of red beads that had a curious resemblance to
+asparagus seed-pods, but she wore them gracefully and stared round-eyed
+at all the festivities.  Lydia and Patience each wore pinned to her
+dress a cotton handkerchief, Lizzie's gift.
+
+John Levine appeared at noon, laden like a pack horse.  This was his
+great opportunity during the year to do things for the Dudley children
+and he took full advantage of the moment.  Books for Lydia, little toys
+for the baby, a pipe for Amos, a woolen dress pattern for Lizzie, a
+blue sailor suit for Lydia, a fur hood for Patience.
+
+John's thin, sallow face glowed, his black eyes gleamed as he watched
+the children unwrap the packages.  In the midst of the excitement,
+Lydia shrieked.
+
+"My ducks!  My ducks!" and bolted for the kitchen.
+
+"The pie!" cried Lizzie, panting after her.
+
+"Don't tell me they're spoiled!" groaned Amos, as with John and the
+baby, he followed into the kitchen.
+
+"Safe!" shouted Lydia, on her knees before the oven.  "Just the pope's
+nose is scorched!  The pie is perfect."
+
+"Let's eat before anything else happens," said Amos, nervously.
+
+"Lord!" said John Levine, "who'd miss spending Christmas where there
+are children?  I'd a gotten out here to-day if I'd had to come
+barefooted."
+
+The dinner was eaten and pronounced perfect.  The gifts were
+re-examined and re-admired.  John Levine, with Lydia and Florence
+Dombey on his lap, Amos with the drowsy little Patience in his arms,
+and Lizzie, her tired hands folded across her comfortable stomach, sat
+round the base burner while the wind rose outside and the boom of the
+ice-locked lake filled the room from time to time.
+
+"Fearful cold when the ice cracks that way," said Amos.
+
+"'The owl, for all his feathers was a-cold,'" murmured Lydia.
+
+"Where'd you get that and what's the rest of it?" asked Levine.
+
+"Selected Gems," replied Lydia.  "It's a book at school.
+
+  "'St. Agnes Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was!
+  The owl for all his feathers was a-cold;
+  The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass
+  And silent was the flock in woolly fold.'
+
+I forget the rest."
+
+The grown-ups glanced at each other over the children's heads.
+
+"Say your pretty Christmas poem you spoke at school, Lydia," suggested
+old Lizzie.
+
+Lydia rested her head back comfortably on John's shoulder and rambled
+on in her childish contralto.
+
+  "Sing low, indeed: and softly bleat,
+  You lambing ewes about her feet,
+  Lest you should wake the child from sleep!
+  No other hour so still and sweet
+  Shall fall for Mary's heart to keep
+  Until her death hour on her creep,
+  Sing soft, the Eve of Mary."
+
+There was silence for a moment.
+
+"Why did you choose that one, young Lydia?" asked Levine.
+
+"I don't know.  I seemed to like it," answered Lydia.  "It's a girl's
+poem.  Gosh, I've been happy to-day!  Daddy, you thought we'd have an
+awful poor Christmas, didn't you?  Poor old Daddy!  Why, I've just felt
+all day as if my heart was on tip-toes."
+
+It had indeed been a high day for the child.  Perhaps she remembered it
+for years after as one of her perfect days, because of the heart
+breaking days that followed.
+
+For little Patience for the first time in her tiny life was taken ill.
+For three or four days after Christmas she was feverish and cross with
+a hoarse cold.  When Amos came home the fourth night, he thought she
+had the croup and sent Lydia pelting through the darkness for the dairy
+farmer's wife.  Mrs. Norton, the mother of Billy, was not long in
+coming to a decision.
+
+"'Tain't regular croup.  You go after the doctor, Mr. Dudley."
+
+Patience, frightened by her difficult breathing, would let no one but
+Lydia touch her.  Under Mrs. Norton's supervision, she packed the baby
+in hot water bottles while Lizzie heated water and stoked the fires
+till the stove doors glowed red.
+
+Amos came back with the doctor about nine o'clock.  Patience was in a
+stupor.  The doctor sent Lydia away while he made his examination.  The
+child clenched her fists and walked up and down the livingroom, cheeks
+scarlet, eyes blazing.  Suddenly she dropped on her knees by the window
+and lifted her clasped hands to the stars.
+
+"God!  God, up there!" she called.  "If you let her die, I'll never
+pray to you again!  Never!  I warned You when You let mother die!"
+
+She remained a moment on her knees, staring at the stars while
+fragments of Sunday School lore flashed through her mind.  "Our Father
+who art in heaven," she said.  "No, that won't do.  Suffer little
+children to come unto me.  Oh, no, no."
+
+The door opened and Lizzie came out, tears-running down her cheeks.
+Lydia flew to her.
+
+"They say I got to tell you.  Diphtheritic croup--her lungs is full--no
+hope."
+
+Lydia struck the kind old hand from her shoulder and dashed out of the
+house.  She ran through the snow to a giant pine by the gate and beat
+her fists against it for how long she did not know.  Pain in her
+bruised hands and the intense cold finally brought her to her senses.
+A self-control that was partly inherent and partly the result of too
+early knowledge of grief and of responsibility came to her rescue.
+With a long sigh, she walked steadily into the house and into the room
+where the baby sister lay in a stupor, breathing stertorously.
+
+The doctor and Amos were there.  Mrs. Norton was now soothing Lizzie in
+the kitchen, now obeying the doctor's orders.  Amos did not stir from
+his chair by the bed, nor speak a word, all that night.  The doctor was
+in his shirt sleeves, prepared to fight as best he could.
+
+"Go out, Lydia," said Dr. Fulton, quietly.
+
+"She'll want me," replied the child.
+
+The doctor looked at Lydia keenly.  He knew her well.  He had ushered
+her as well as Patience into the world.  He pulled her to him, with one
+hand, not relinquishing his hold on the baby's pulse with the other.
+
+"She's in a stupor and won't miss you, Lydia.  She is not suffering at
+all.  Now, I want you to go to bed like a good girl."
+
+"I won't," said Lydia, quietly.
+
+"Lydia," the doctor went on, as if he were talking to a grown person,
+"all your life you will be grateful to me, if I make you obey me now.
+I know those wild nerves of yours, too much and too early controlled.
+_Lydia, go to bed_!"
+
+Not because she feared him but because some knowledge beyond her years
+told her of his wisdom, Lydia turned, found Florence Dombey in the
+living-room and with her and a blanket, crept under her father's bed,
+into the farthest corner where she lay wide-eyed until dawn.  Some one
+closed the door into the room then, and shortly, she fell asleep.
+
+In three days, the like of which are the longest, the shortest days of
+life, the house had returned to the remnant of its old routine.  The
+place had been fumigated.  Lydia had placed in her bedroom everything
+that had belonged to the baby, had locked the door and had moved
+herself into Lizzie's room.  Amos departed before dawn as usual with
+his dinner pail, stumbling like an old man, over the road.
+
+The quarantine sign was on the house and no one but the undertaker, the
+doctor, Mrs. Norton and John Levine had been allowed to come to see the
+stricken little family, excepting the minister.  He, poor man, had
+babies of his own, and had been nervous during the few short minutes of
+the service.
+
+Lydia and Lizzie put in the morning cleaning the cottage.  Never since
+they had lived in it had the little house been so spic and span.  At
+noon, they sat down to lunch in a splendor of cleanliness that made the
+place seem stranger than ever to them both.  Neither talked much.  At
+intervals, tears ran down old Lizzie's wrinkled cheeks and Lydia looked
+at her wonderingly.  Lydia had not shed a tear.  But all the time her
+cheeks were scarlet, her hands were cold and trembled and her stomach
+ached.
+
+"You must eat, childie.  You haven't eat enough to keep a bird alive
+since--since--"
+
+There was a bang on the door, and Lizzie trundled over to open it.
+
+"For the Lord's sake, Kent!"
+
+Kent it was, big and rosy with his skates over his shoulders.  He
+walked into the living-room deliberately.
+
+"Hello, Lydia," he said, "I came out to see your Christmas presents."
+
+Lydia clasped her hands.  "Oh, Kent, I'm so glad!  But you can't stay!
+We're quarantined."
+
+"What the seventeen thunder-bugs do I care," returned Kent, gruffly,
+looking away from Lydia's appealing eyes.
+
+Lydia laughed, as she always did at Kent's astonishing oaths.  At the
+sound of the laughter, old Lizzie gave a sigh as though some of her own
+tense nerves had relaxed.
+
+"Now see here," growled Kent, "they've got no business to shut you up
+this way.  You come out and skate for a while.  The wind's blown the
+snow till there's lots of clear places.  I got up here without much
+trouble.  We won't meet anybody at this end of the lake."
+
+"Just the thing, quarantine or not!" exclaimed, Lizzie, briskly.  "And
+I'll cook a surprise for the two of you.  Keep her out an hour, Kent."
+
+Lydia silently got into overcoat and leggings and pulled on her Tam o'
+Shanter.  She brought her skates from the kitchen and the two children
+made their way to the lake shore.
+
+It was a brilliant afternoon.  The vast white expanse of the lake was
+dotted with the flash of opals wherever the wind had exposed the ice to
+the winter sun.  Far down the lake toward the college shore, the
+flitting sails of ice-boats gleamed, and faint and far up the wind came
+the clear "cling-pling" of their steel runners.  The mercury was
+hovering around ten or twelve above zero as the fierce booming of the
+expanding ice attested.
+
+With unwonted consideration, Kent helped Lydia strap on her skates.
+Then the two started, hand in hand, up the lake.  They skated well, as
+did most of the children of the community.  The wind in their faces was
+bitter cold, making conversation difficult.  Whether or not Kent was
+grateful for this, one could not say.  He watched Lydia out of the tail
+of his eye and as the wind whipped the old red into her cheeks, he
+began to whistle.  They had been going perhaps fifteen minutes when the
+little girl stumbled several times.
+
+"What's the matter, Lyd?" asked Kent.
+
+"I don't know," she panted.  "I--I guess I'm tired."
+
+"Tired already!  Gosh!  And you've always worn me out.  Come on up to
+the shore, and I'll make a fire, so's you can rest."
+
+Lydia, who always had scorned the thought of rest, while at play,
+followed meekly and stood in silence while Kent without removing his
+skates hobbled up the bank and pulled some dead branches to the shore.
+Shortly he had a bright blaze at her feet.  He kicked the snow off a
+small log.
+
+"Sit down--here where you get the warmth," he ordered, his voice as
+gruff as he could make it.
+
+Lydia sat down obediently, her mittened hands clasping her knees.  Kent
+stood staring at his little chum.  He took in the faded blue Tam, the
+outgrown coat, the red mittens, so badly mended, the leggings with
+patches on the knees.  Then he eyed the heavy circles around her eyes
+and the droop to the mouth that was meant to be merry.
+
+"I'm sorriest for Lydia," his mother had said that morning.  "No mother
+could feel much worse than she does, and she's got no one to turn to
+for comfort.  I know Amos.  He'll shut up like a clam.  Just as soon as
+they're out of quarantine, I'll go out there."
+
+Kent was only a boy, but he was mature in spite of his heedless ways.
+Staring at the tragedy in Lydia's ravished little face, a sympathy for
+her pain as real as it was unwonted swept over him.  Suddenly he
+dropped down beside her on the log and threw his boyish arms about her.
+
+"I'm so doggone sorry for you, Lydia!" he whispered.
+
+Lydia lifted startled eyes to his.  Never before had Kent shown her the
+slightest affection.  When she saw the sweetness and sympathy in his
+brown gaze,
+
+"Oh, Kent," she whispered, "why did God let it happen!  Why did He?"
+and she buried her face on his shoulder and began to sob.  Softly at
+first, then with a racking agony of tears.
+
+Even a child is wise in the matter of grief.  Kent's lips trembled, but
+he made no attempt to comfort Lydia.  He only held her tightly and
+watched the fire with bright, unseeing eyes.  And after what seemed a
+long, long time, the sobs grew less.  Finally, he slipped a pocket
+handkerchief into Lydia's hand.  It was gray with use but of a
+comforting size.
+
+"Wipe your eyes, old lady," he said in a cheerful, matter of fact tone.
+"I've got to put the fire out, so's we can start home."
+
+Lydia mopped her face and by the time Kent had the fire smothered with
+snow, she was standing, sad-eyed but calm except for dry sobs.  Kent
+picked up one of the sticks he had brought for the fire.
+
+"Catch hold," he said, "I'll pull you home."
+
+Old Lizzie was watching for them and when they came stamping into the
+dining-room, they found a pitcher of steaming cocoa and a plate of
+bread and butter with hot gingerbread awaiting them.
+
+"See if you can get her to eat, Kent," said Lizzie.
+
+"Sure, she'll eat," Kent answered her.  "Gimme back my hanky, Lyd!"
+
+Lizzie gave a keen look at Lydia's tear-stained face and turned
+abruptly into the kitchen.  She came back in a moment to find Lydia
+silently eating what Kent had set before her.
+
+Kent ate hugely and talked without cessation.  About what, Lydia did
+not know, for the sleep that had been long denied her was claiming her.
+She did not know that she almost buried her head in her second cup of
+cocoa, nor that Kent helped carry her to the couch behind the
+living-room base burner.
+
+"Is she sick?  Shall I get the doctor?" he whispered as old Lizzie
+tucked a shawl over her.
+
+"Sick!  No!  No!  She's just dead for sleep.  She's neither cried nor
+eat nor had a decent hour of sleep since it happened.  And now, thanks
+to you, she's done all three.  You are a good boy, Kent Moulton."
+
+Kent looked suddenly foolish and embarrassed.  "Aw--that's nothing," he
+muttered.  "Where's my coat?  Maybe I'll come out again to-morrow, if I
+ain't got anything better to do."
+
+All the rest of the winter afternoon, Lydia slept.  The sun dipped low
+beyond the white hills, filling the living-room with scarlet for one
+breathless moment, before a blanket of twilight hid all save the red
+eyes of the base burner.  Amos came home at seven and he and Lizzie ate
+supper in silence except for the old lady's story of Kent's visit.
+
+"Poor young one," muttered Amos, looking slowly toward the quiet blond
+head on the faded brown cushion.  "I'm glad she's a child and 'll
+forget it soon."
+
+Lizzie gave Amos a curious glance.  "You don't know Lydia, Amos," she
+said.
+
+He did not seem to hear her.  He moved his chair toward the stove, put
+his feet on the fender, lighted his pipe and then sat without moving
+until a stamping of feet and a hearty rap on the door roused him.
+Lizzie let John Levine in.
+
+"Where's Lydia?" was Levine's first Question.
+
+Lizzie pointed to the couch, where, undisturbed, Lydia slept on.
+
+"Good!" said John.  He drew his chair up beside Amos' and the two fell
+into low-voiced conversation.
+
+It must have been nine o'clock when Lydia opened her eyes to hear Amos
+say fretfully,
+
+"I tell you, I went to him to-day as I'll go to no man again.  I begged
+him to renew the note, but he insisted his duty to the bank wouldn't
+let him.  I told him it would put you in a terrible fix, that you'd
+gone on the note when you couldn't afford it.  He grinned a devil's
+grin then and said, 'Amos, I know you've got nothing to lose in this.
+If you had, for the sake of your children--I mean Lydia, I'd hold off.
+But Levine can fix it up!'"
+
+"So I could, ordinarily," said Levine in a troubled voice.  "But it
+just happens that everything I've got on earth is shoe-stringed out to
+hang onto that pine section of mine up in Bear county.  I'm mortgaged
+up to my eyebrows.  Marshall knows it and sees a chance to get hold of
+the pines, damn him!"
+
+Lydia sat up and rubbed her eyes.
+
+"Well!  Well! young Lydia," cried Levine.  "Had a fine sleep, didn't
+you!"
+
+"I'm awful hungry," said the child.
+
+"Bless your soul," exclaimed Lizzie.  "I'll warm your supper up for you
+in a minute."
+
+Lydia stood with hands outstretched to the base burner, her hair
+tumbled, her glance traveling from Amos to Levine.
+
+"What makes Mr. Marshall act so?" she asked.
+
+"Sho," said Levine, "little girls your age don't know anything about
+such things, do they, Amos?  Come here.  You shall eat your supper on
+my lap."
+
+"I'm getting too old for laps," said Lydia, coming very willingly
+nevertheless within the compass of John's long arms.  "But I love you
+next to Daddy now, in all the world."
+
+John swept her to his knees and put his cheek against hers for a
+moment, while tears gleamed in his black eyes.
+
+"Eat your supper and go to bed, Lydia," said Amos.
+
+"Don't be so cross, Amos," protested Levine.
+
+"God knows I'm not cross--to Lydia of all people in the world," sighed
+Amos, "but she worries over money matters just the way her mother did
+and I want to finish talking this over with you."
+
+"There's nothing more to talk about," Levine's voice was short.  "Let
+him call in the loan, the fat hog!"
+
+Lydia slept the long night through.  She awoke refreshed and renewed.
+After first adjusting herself to the awful sense of loss, which is the
+worst of waking in grief, the recollection of the conversation she had
+heard the night before returned with sickening vividness.  After she
+had wiped the breakfast dishes for Lizzie she stood for a long time at
+the living-room window with Florence Dombey in her arms staring at the
+lake.  Finally, she tucked the doll up comfortably on the couch and
+announced to Lizzie that she was going skating.
+
+An hour later, Dave Marshall heard his clerk protesting outside his
+door and a childish voice saying, "But please, just for a minute.  He
+likes me.  He truly does."
+
+Then the door opened and Lydia, breathless and rosy and threadbare,
+came into his little private office.  She closed the door and stood
+with her back against it, unsmiling.
+
+"I'm in quarantine," she said, "so I won't come near you."
+
+"Why, Lydia!" exclaimed Marshall, "where did you come from!"
+
+"Home.  Mr. Marshall, won't you fix Daddy's note if he gives you me?"
+
+"Huh!" ejaculated Marshall.
+
+"You said last fall," the child went on, her voice quavering but her
+eyes resolute, "that if Daddy ever wanted to sell me, you'd buy me.  I
+think I ought to be worth a thousand dollars.  I can do so much work
+around the house and help you train Margery!  I can work hard.  You ask
+John Levine."
+
+Marshall's fat face was purple and then pale.
+
+"Does your father know you're here, Lydia?" he asked.
+
+She clasped her mittened hands in sudden agitation.
+
+"Nobody knows but you," she exclaimed.  "Oh! you mustn't tell the man
+out there my name.  I'm in quarantine and I'd be arrested, if the
+health office knew!"
+
+"I won't tell," said Dave, gently.  "Come over here by me, Lydia.
+Margery is away on a visit so I'm not afraid for her."
+
+Lydia crossed the room.  Marshall took the skates from her shoulders
+and unfastened her coat.
+
+"Sit down on that chair and let's talk this over.  You know what a note
+is, do you, Lydia?"
+
+"It's money you owe," she said, her blue eyes anxiously fixed on
+Marshall's face.
+
+He nodded.  "Yes.  When your mother was sick, your father asked my bank
+here to lend him a thousand dollars for two years.  Now, your father is
+very poor.  He doesn't own anything that's worth a thousand dollars and
+I knew he could never pay it back.  So I told him he must get some one
+to promise to pay that money for him if he couldn't, at the end of the
+two years.  Understand?"
+
+Lydia nodded.
+
+"Well, he got John Levine.  Now the two years are up and unless that
+thousand dollars is paid, the people whose money I take care of in the
+bank, will each lose some of that thousand.  See?"
+
+Lydia stared at him, struggling to take in the explanation.  "I see,"
+she said.  "But if you'd pay a thousand dollars for me, that would fix
+it all up."
+
+"Why Lydia, do you mean you would leave your father?"
+
+"I wouldn't want to," she answered earnestly, "but Lizzie could take
+care of Daddy.  He doesn't really need me.  There isn't anybody really
+needs me--needs me--now--"
+
+She swallowed a sob, then went on.  "Mr. Levine just mustn't pay it.
+He's awful worried.  His land's fixed so's he'd never get over it.  And
+he's the best friend we have in all the world.  He just mustn't pay it.
+It would kill mother, if she knew.  Oh, she hated borrowing so."
+
+Marshall chewed his cigar.  "Levine," he growled, "is a long legged
+crook."
+
+Lydia flew out of her chair and shook her fist in the banker's face.
+"Don't you dare say that!" she cried.  "He's a dear lamb, that's what
+he is."
+
+Dave's fat jaw dropped.  "A dear lamb, eh?  Ask him some time what a
+land shark is--a dear lamb?"
+
+He went on chewing his cigar and Lydia returned to her chair.  Whether
+it was the anxious round eyes, above the scarlet cheeks, whether it was
+the wistful droop of the childish lips, whether it was the look that
+belongs to ravished motherhood and seemed grossly wrong on a child's
+face, whether it was some thought of his own pampered little daughter,
+whether it was that curious appeal Lydia always made to men, or a
+combination of all, that moved Marshall, he could not have told.  But
+suddenly he burst forth.
+
+"Good God, I've done hard things in my life, but I can't do this!
+Lydia, you go home and tell your father I'll renew that note, but he's
+got to pay the interest and ten per cent. of the principal, every year
+till he's paid it up.  Here, I'll write it down.  And tell him that I'm
+not doing it for him or for that skunk of a Levine, but I'm doing it
+for you.  Here, I'll write that down, _too_."
+
+He folded the bit of paper and put it in an envelope.  "Come here," he
+said.  He pinned the note into the pocket of her blouse.  "Understand,
+Lydia," he said in a low voice, tilting her head up so that he looked
+down into her eyes, "I'm buying your friendship with this.  You go on
+living with your father and taking care of him, but I'm buying your
+friendship for me and Margery--for good and all."  He looked out of the
+window with a curious air of abstraction.  Then, "Button your coat and
+run along."
+
+"I haven't thanked you," exclaimed Lydia, "I can't thank you.  Oh, but
+thank you, Mr. Marshall--I--I--" she began to tremble violently.
+
+"Stop!" roared Marshall.  "And you tell your father to look out for
+your nerves.  Now skip."  And Lydia's trembling stopped and she skipped.
+
+She did not tell Lizzie of her errand and that faithful soul was too
+glad to see her eat her dinner to think to ask her why she had skated
+so long.  Kent came out in the afternoon and the two fished through the
+ice until sunset, when they came in with a string of fish sufficiently
+long to divide and make a meal for the Dudleys and the Moultons.  At
+dusk, Kent departed with his fish and "Men of Iron," loaned by Lydia as
+a special favor, under his arm.
+
+Old Lizzie cleaned the fish and Lydia fried them, with the daintiness
+and skill that seemed to have been born in her.  She laid an envelope
+at her father's plate and when he sat down, silent and abstracted,
+without heeding the fish, she shook her head at Lizzie who was about to
+protest.
+
+"Where'd this come from?" he asked, absentmindedly opening the
+envelope.  Then, "For God's sake!  Lydia--where? how?"
+
+"It was like this," said Lydia.  "Set the fish back to warm, while I
+explain, Lizzie.  It was like this--" and she gave a full history of
+her morning's visit, to her two speechless listeners.  "And I ran all
+the way to the lake and I skated like the wind, and I never told Lizzie
+a word, though I nearly busted!"
+
+Amos looked from Lydia to Lizzie, from Lizzie to Lydia.
+
+"Lydia--my little daughter--" he faltered.
+
+The tears flew to Lydia's eyes and she spoke hastily, "Lizzie, show him
+the fish we caught!"
+
+Amos smiled while he shook his head.  "I won't forget it, Lydia.  In
+spite of little Patience's going, you've taken ten years off me this
+night.  What do you suppose John Levine will say?"
+
+"He'll say," replied Lydia, taking her serving of fish, "'If you were
+ten years older, Lydia, and I were ten years younger,' and I'll
+say--'then we'd travel.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ADAM
+
+
+"A thousand deaths have fed my roots--yet to what end?"--_The Murmuring
+Pine_.
+
+
+The days slipped by, as days will, even though they are grief laden.
+Slowly and inarticulately for the most part, Lydia struggled to adjust
+herself to her new loss.  She went back to school, after the quarantine
+was lifted and the familiar routine there helped her.  She was a good
+student and was doing well in the eighth grade.  During school hours
+her books absorbed her, and she worried through the evenings reading or
+sewing, with Florence Dombey always in her lap.
+
+Florence Dombey was a great comfort to the child.  She slept at night
+with her black head beside Lydia's yellow one.  Sometimes she slipped
+into the middle of the bed and fat Lizzie rolled on her and woke with a
+groan.
+
+"I'd just as soon sleep with a cannon-ball at my back," the good soul
+told Lydia.  But she never uttered a more violent protest.
+
+Lydia never entered the locked bedroom off the kitchen.  Amos,
+self-absorbed and over-worked, asked no questions, but one night in
+April, John Levine saw Lydia at work on a night dress for Florence
+Dombey.
+
+"Where does the young lady sleep?" he asked.
+
+Lydia explained and Lizzie uttered her mild plaint, adding, "Lydia
+ought to be getting back to her own bed, now warm weather will be
+coming in."
+
+Lydia caught her lower lip in her teeth but said nothing.  Levine
+scrutinized the curly head bent over the sewing, then went on with his
+conversation with Amos.  He was working quietly on his campaign, a year
+hence, for the office of sheriff and Amos, who was an influential
+Mason, was planning to use his influence for his friend.  Lydia,
+absorbed in sad little memories over her sewing or happily drugged in
+some book, heeded these discussions only subconsciously.
+
+Just before leaving, John asked for a drink of water and Amos went to
+the pump to bring in a fresh pail.  He stopped while there to fuss over
+a barrel in which he had an old hen setting on some eggs he had got
+from Mrs. Norton.  Lizzie had gone to bed early.
+
+"Young Lydia," said John, as soon as they were alone, "come here."
+
+When she was perched in her old place on his knee, "Don't you think
+it's time for you to get back to your own bedroom with its view of the
+lake?" he asked.
+
+Lydia looked at him dumbly.
+
+"You don't like to sleep in that stuffy bedroom with Lizzie, do you,
+dear?"
+
+"No," replied the child.  "She's fat and snores and won't have the
+window open--but--"
+
+"But what?" Levine's voice was gentle.
+
+"I'm afraid to sleep alone."
+
+"Afraid?  Lydia--not of any memory of dear little Patience!"
+
+"No!  No! but I have nightmares nearly every night--she--she's choking
+and I--I can't help her.  Then I wake up and catch hold of Lizzie.  Oh,
+don't make me sleep alone!"
+
+"Why, my dear little girl--"  John caught the child's thin hands in a
+firm, warm grip.  She was trembling violently and her fingers twitched.
+"This won't do!  That's what keeps the dark rings round your eyes, is
+it?  Of course you shan't sleep alone!  How does school go?"
+
+"Fine," answered the child.  "I hate grammar and diagramming, but the
+rest is easy."
+
+"And what book are you reading now?"
+
+"I'm starting 'David Copperfield.'"
+
+"Here comes your father.  It's bedtime, isn't it?  Good night, my dear."
+
+Lydia picked up Florence Dombey and went slowly off to bed as her
+father came in with a glass of water.
+
+"That fool hen isn't fully convinced she wants a family," he said.
+
+The bedroom door closed after Lydia.
+
+"Amos," said John, "that child's nerves are all shot to pieces."  He
+related his conversation with Lydia.
+
+"What can I do?" asked Amos, with a worried air.  "Seems to me she's
+just got to wear it out.  It's awful hard she's had to be up against
+these things--but, I swan!--"
+
+Levine grunted and put on his hat.  "I wish she was my daughter," he
+said.  "If you'll ask Brown to come around to the Elks Club to-morrow,
+I'll talk to him."
+
+Amos nodded and John mounted his bicycle and rode away.  On the Friday
+afternoon following when Lydia got home from school, she found the
+house apparently deserted.  But there issued from the neighborhood of
+the kitchen a yipping and ki-yi-ing that would have moved a heart of
+stone.  Lydia ran into the kitchen.  The puppy wails came from behind
+the door of the old bedroom.
+
+"Who's in there!" she called.
+
+The yipping changed to deep barks of joy.  Lydia tried the door.  It
+opened easily and a great, blundering puppy hurled himself at her.
+Lydia was a dog lover.
+
+"You love!  You lamb!" she cried.  She squatted on the floor and the
+pup crowded his great hulk into her lap, licking her face and wagging
+his whole body.
+
+There was a note tied to his collar.  Lydia untied it: "Dearest Young
+Lydia:--Here is a friend who wants to share your bedroom with you.  You
+must bring him up to be a polite, obedient dog, and a credit to your
+other friend, John Levine."
+
+"Oh!" squealed Lydia.  "Oh! but why did they tie you in here!"  She
+looked about the room.  The old bed had been moved out and the
+dining-room couch moved in.  The bureau had been shifted to another
+corner.  There was nothing to be seen of all little Patience's
+belongings.  It did not look like the same room.
+
+As she clung to the squirming puppy and stared, Lizzie came in.
+
+"Ain't it nice?" she asked.  "Mr. Levine came out with the dog this
+afternoon and suggested the change.  He helped me.  We stored all the
+other things up in the attic.  See the old quilt in the corner?  That's
+for the dog to sleep on.  Ain't he as big as an elephant!  I'm afraid
+he'll eat as much as a man."
+
+"He can have half of my food," cried Lydia.  "Oh, Lizzie, isn't he
+beautiful!"
+
+"Well, no," replied Lizzie, truthfully.  "He looks to me as if some one
+had stepped on his face.  You'd better take him out for a run."
+
+John Levine never did a wiser or a kinder thing than to give the
+brindle English bulldog to Lydia.  He was a puppy of nine months, well
+bred and strong.  Lydia took him into her empty little heart with a
+completeness that belongs to the natural dog lover and that was
+enhanced by her bereavement.  And he, being of a breed that is as
+amiable and loyal as it is unlovely to look upon, attached himself
+unalterably and entirely to Lydia.  She and Kent cast about some time
+before deciding on a name.  At first they thought seriously of naming
+him John, after the donor, but decided that this might lead to
+confusion.  Then they discovered that Levine's middle name was Adam,
+and Adam the brindle bull became, forthwith.
+
+Lydia made no objection to returning to the old room.  It had lost its
+familiar outlines.  And Adam, refusing the quilt on the floor,
+established himself on the foot of the couch where all night long he
+snuffled and snored and Lydia, who had objected to Lizzie's audible
+slumbers, now, waking with nightmares, heard Adam's rumbling with a
+sigh of relief, pressed her feet for comfort against his warm,
+throbbing body, and went off to sleep immediately.
+
+In May the garden was planted and in June, Lydia graduated from the
+eighth grade, and the long summer vacation had begun.  Margery
+Marshall, although Lydia's age, was not a good student and was two
+grades below her.  After the episode of the note, Lydia made a
+conscientious effort to play with Margery at recess and when vacation
+began, she called for the banker's daughter regularly every week to go
+swimming.
+
+Occasionally Elviry would invite her into the house to wait for
+Margery.  At such times Lydia would stare with wondering delight at the
+marvels of the quartered oak, plush upholstered furniture, the
+"Body-Brussels" rugs, and the velour portieres that adorned the parlor.
+
+Outwardly this summer was much like the previous one, except that there
+was a quiet contentment about Amos in spite of his real mourning for
+his baby daughter, that had been foreign to him for years.  It was the
+garden that did this.  Not only was it a wonderful garden to look on
+and to eat from, but with it Amos paid for milk and butter from the
+Nortons and for a part of his groceries.  This made possible the year's
+interest and payment on the note.
+
+Lydia sewed for Florence Dombey, climbed trees, swam and played pirates
+with Kent.  But as a matter of fact, the old childish zest for these
+things had gone.  For Lydia's real childhood had left her that December
+night she had spent under the far corner of her father's bed.  She had
+not prayed since then.  Her young faith in the kindness and sweetness
+of life, badly shaken by her mother's death, had been utterly destroyed
+when little Patience had been taken from her.
+
+With Adam at her heels, she took to solitary tramping through the
+neighboring woods where at times she met Indians from the
+reservation--a buck asleep on a log--a couple of squaws laughing and
+chatting while they ate food they had begged--an Indian boy, dusty and
+tired, resting after a trip to Lake City.  Lydia was a little afraid of
+these dark folk, though they always smiled at her.  She would jerk at
+Adam's collar and cuff his ears for growling, then make off toward home.
+
+It was a walk of just a mile from the cottage to the High School.
+Lydia was very nervous about her first day at High School.  Kent was
+entering at the same time and she would have liked to have asked to go
+with him but she knew he would resent violently being associated with a
+girl on so important an occasion.
+
+So it was that one of the teachers observed a child in a faded but
+clean galatea sailor suit, with curly blond hair barely long enough to
+tie in her neck, standing in one of the lower halls after the mob of
+seven or eight hundred boys and girls had been successfully herded into
+the great Assembly room.
+
+"What is your name, my dear?" asked the teacher.
+
+Lydia silently presented her promotion card.  The teacher nodded.
+
+"Come along, Miss Dudley, or you'll miss the principal's speech."
+
+She seated Lydia near her in the Assembly room, then looked her over
+curiously.  The child's face was remarkably intelligent, a high bred
+little face under a finely domed head.  The back of her ears and the
+back of her neck were dirty, and her thin hands were rough as if with
+housework.  The galatea sailor suit was cheap and coarse.
+
+"A sick mother or no mother," was the teacher's mental note.  "I must
+inquire about her.  Almost too bashful to breathe.  Precocious
+mentally, a child physically.  I'll look out for her to-day."
+
+Miss Towne had the reputation of an unfeeling disciplinarian among the
+pupils, but Lydia did not know this.  She only knew that by some
+miracle of kindness she came to understand the classroom system of
+recitations, that she was introduced to different teachers, that she
+learned how to decipher the hours of her recitations from the
+complicated chart on the Assembly room blackboard, and that at noon she
+started for home with a list of textbooks to be purchased, and a
+perfectly clear idea of what to do when she returned on the morrow.
+
+The streets were full of children of all ages flocking toward the book
+stores.  Lydia walked along slowly, thinking deeply.  She knew that her
+list of books came to something over five dollars.  She knew that this
+sum of money would floor her father and she knew that she would rather
+beg on the streets than start Amos on one of his tirades on his poverty.
+
+She pegged along homeward, half elated over the excitement of the day,
+half depressed over her book problem.  When she turned into the dirt
+road.  Billy Norton overtook her.  He was wearing a very high starched
+collar and a new suit of clothes.  Billy was a senior and felt his
+superiority.  Nevertheless, he wanted to tell his troubles--even to a
+first year pupil.
+
+"Gee, don't I have the luck!" he groaned.  "I could get on the School
+football team, I know it, if I didn't have to come home right after
+school to deliver milk.  Hang it!"
+
+Lydia looked at him quickly.  "How much milk do you have to deliver?"
+
+"Aw, just a snag.  Two quarts up the road to Essers' and two to
+Stones'.  They both got babies and have to have it.  Think of putting
+me off the school team for four quarts of baby milk!"
+
+"Oh, Billy," gasped Lydia, "I'll do it for you--if--Billy, have you got
+your freshman textbooks still?"
+
+"Sure," answered the boy.  "They're awful banged up, but I guess all
+the pages are there."
+
+Lydia was breathless with excitement.  "Billy, if you'll let me have
+your books, I'll carry the milk for you, all winter."
+
+The big boy looked at the little girl, curiously.
+
+"They're a ratty lot of old books, Lydia.  Half the fun of having
+school books is getting new ones."
+
+"I know that," she answered, flushing.
+
+"Hanged if I'll do it.  Let your dad get you new ones."
+
+"He'd like to as well as any one, but he can't right now and I'm going
+to look out for my own.  Oh, Billy, let me do it!"
+
+"You can have 'em all and welcome," exclaimed Billy, with a sudden
+huskiness in his voice.  "Gosh, you're awful little, Lydia."
+
+Lydia stamped her foot.  "I won't take anything for nothing.  And I'm
+not little.  I'm as strong as a horse."
+
+"Well," conceded Billy, "just till after Thanksgiving is all I want.
+Come on along home now and we'll fix it up with Ma."
+
+Ma Norton twisted Lydia around and retied her hair ribbon while she
+listened.  They all knew Lydia's pride, so she quenched the impulse to
+give the child the books and said, "Till Thanksgiving is plenty of pay,
+Billy, and when the snow comes, the two mile extra walking will be too
+much.  Get the books out of the parlor closet.  You got a--a--ink on
+the back of your neck, Lydia.  Wait till I get it off for you."
+
+She wet a corner of a towel at the tea kettle and proceeded to scour
+the unsuspecting Lydia's neck and ears.  "Children in the high school
+are apt to get ink in the _back_ of their necks and _ears_," she said.
+"_Always_ scrub there, Lydia!  Remember!"
+
+"Yes, Ma'm!  Oh, gosh, what a big pile!  Thank you ever so much, Billy.
+I'll be here right after school to-morrow, Mrs. Norton."
+
+Lydia spent a blissful evening mending and cleaning Billy's textbooks,
+with Adam snoring under her feet and her father absorbed in his
+newspaper.
+
+The delivering of the milk was no task at all, though had it not been
+for Adam trudging beside her with his rolling bulldog gait and his
+slavering ugly jaw, she would have been afraid in the early dusk of the
+autumn evenings.
+
+The High School was a different world from that of the old ward school.
+The ward school, comprising children of only one neighborhood with the
+grades small, was a democratic, neighborly sort of place.  The High
+School gathered together children from all over town, of all classes,
+from the children of lumber kings and college professors, to the
+offspring of the Norwegian day laborer and the German saloon keeper.
+There were even several colored children in the High School as well as
+an Indian lad named Charlie Jackson.  In the High School, class feeling
+was strong.  There were Greek letter societies in the fourth grade,
+reflecting the influence of the college on the lake shore.  Among the
+well-to-do girls, and also among those who could less well afford it,
+there was much elaborate dressing.  Dancing parties were weekly
+occurrences.  They were attended by first year girls of fourteen and
+fifteen as well as by the older girls, each lass with an attendant lad,
+who called for her and took her home unchaperoned.
+
+It took several months for Lydia to become aware of the complicated
+social life going on about her.  She was so absorbed while in school in
+adjusting herself to the new type of school life,--a different teacher
+for each study, heavier lessons, the responsibility of collateral
+reading--that the Christmas holidays came before she realized that
+except in her class room work, she had nothing whatever in common with
+her classmates.
+
+All fall she saw very little of Kent.  He was on the freshman football
+squad and this was a perfectly satisfactory explanation of his
+dereliction--had he cared to make any--as far as Saturdays went.  In
+the Assembly room because he had chosen the Classical course, his seat
+was far from Lydia's, who had chosen the English course.
+
+Saturday was a busy day for Lydia at home.  Old Lizzie, who was nearing
+sixty, was much troubled with rheumatism and even careless Lydia felt
+vaguely that the house needed a certain amount of cleaning once a week.
+So, of a Saturday morning, she slammed through the house like a small
+whirlwind, leaving corners undisturbed and dust in windrows, but
+satisfied with her efforts.  Saturday afternoon, she worked in the
+garden when the day was fair, helping to gather the winter vegetables.
+Before little Patience's death she had gone to Sunday School, but since
+that time she had not entered a church.  So Sunday became her feast
+day.  She put in the entire morning preparing a Sunday dinner for her
+father and nearly always John Levine.  After dinner, the three, with
+Adam, would tramp a mile up the road, stopping to lean over the bars
+and talk dairying with Pa Norton, winter wheat with Farmer Jansen, and
+hardy alfalfa with old Schmidt.  Between farms, Amos and John always
+talked politics, local and national, arguing heatedly.
+
+To all this, Lydia listened with half an ear.  She loved these walks,
+partly because of the grown up talks, partly because Adam loved them,
+mostly because of the beauty of the wooded hills, the far stretch of
+the black fields, ready plowed for spring and the pale, tender blue of
+the sky that touched the near horizon.  If she missed and needed
+playmates of her own age, she was scarcely conscious of the fact.
+
+Christmas came and went, sadly and quietly.  Lydia was glad when the
+holidays were over and she was back in school again.  On her desk that
+first morning lay a tiny envelope, addressed to her.  She opened it.
+In it was an invitation from Miss Towne to attend a reception she was
+tendering to the members of her Algebra and Geometry classes, freshmen
+and seniors.
+
+For a moment Lydia was in heaven.  It was her first formal invitation
+of any kind.  Then she came rapidly to earth.  She had nothing to wear!
+It was an evening party and she had no way to go or come.  She put the
+precious card in her blouse pocket and soberly opened her Civil
+Government.
+
+At recess, she sat alone as she was rather prone to do, in the window
+of the cloak room, when she heard a group of girls chattering.
+
+"Who wants to go to grouchy old Towne's reception when you can go to a
+dance?  I've got two bids to the Phi Pi's party," said a
+fourteen-year-old miss.
+
+"Oh, we'll have to go or she'll flunk us in Algebra," said another
+girl.  "I'll wear my pink silk organdy.  What'll you wear?"
+
+"My red silk.  Maybe she'll let us dance.  I suppose Charlie and
+Kent'll both want to take me."
+
+"Terrible thing to be popular!  Hasn't Kent the sweetest eyes!  Do you
+know what he said to me the other night at the Evans' party?"
+
+The girls drifted out of the cloak room.  Lydia sat  rigid.  Pink
+organdy!  Red  silk!  Kent's "sweetest eyes"!  Then she looked down at
+the inevitable sailor suit, and at her patched and broken shoes.  So
+far she had had few pangs about her clothes.  But now for the first
+time she realized that for some reason, she was an alien, different
+from the other girls--and the realization made her heart ache.
+
+The bell rang and she went to her recitation.  It was in Civil
+Government.  Lydia sat down dejectedly next to Charlie Jackson, the
+splendid, swarthy Indian boy of sixteen.
+
+"Did you learn the preamble?" he whispered to Lydia.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"He didn't say we had to," Charlie went on, "but I like the sound of
+it, so I did."
+
+The rest of the class filed in, thirty youngsters of fourteen or
+fifteen, the boys surreptitiously shoving and kicking each other, the
+girls giggling and rearranging their hair.  Mr. James rapped on his
+desk, and called on young Hansen.
+
+"Can you give the preamble to the Constitution?" he asked, cheerfully.
+
+The boy's jaw dropped.  "You never told us to learn it," he said.
+
+"No, I merely suggested that as Americans, you ought to learn it.  I
+talked to you during most of yesterday's period about it.  I wondered
+if you were old enough to take suggestions and not be driven through
+your books.  Miss Olson?"
+
+Miss Olson, whose hair was done in the latest mode, tossed her head
+pertly.
+
+"I was too busy to learn anything extra."
+
+Mr. James' eyebrows went up.  "A dance last night, I suppose."  He
+continued with his query half way round the class, then paused with a
+sigh.  "Has any one in the class learned it?"
+
+A muscular brown hand shot up, boldly.  A thin white one timidly
+followed.
+
+"Ah!"  Mr. James' face brightened.  "Miss Dudley, try it."
+
+Lydia clutched the back of the seat before her and began timidly.  Then
+the dignity and somewhat of the significance of the words touched her
+and her voice became rich and full.
+
+"'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect
+union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the
+common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of
+liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this
+Constitution for the United States of America.'"
+
+"Good.  Try it, Mr. Jackson."
+
+The young Indian rose and began.  "We, the people of the United
+States--"  He too was letter perfect.
+
+After he was seated, the teacher, a gray-haired, stern-faced man,
+looked at the two attentively.
+
+"Miss Dudley," he said finally, "does the preamble _mean_ anything to
+you?"
+
+Lydia's round childish eyes regarded him steadfastly.  "Two of my
+ancestors were delegates to the first Convention," she said
+hesitatingly.  "One of 'em lived in a log farmhouse with loop holes in
+it.  They used to shoot Indians--" she paused and looked at Charlie
+Jackson, then went on.  "I--I like the sound of the words."
+
+The teacher nodded.  "And you, Jackson?"
+
+The boy scowled.  "I know the words are lies as far as Indians are
+concerned.  And I know they needn't have been if whites weren't natural
+hogs.  Anyhow, I'm the only real American in the class."
+
+Lydia looked up at the brown face eagerly, questioningly.  Mr. James
+nodded.  "Quite right, Jackson."
+
+Young Hansen spoke up.  "We're all Americans.  What's he giving us?"
+
+"Has your father been naturalized, Hansen?" asked the teacher.
+
+The Norwegian boy shook his head, shamefacedly.
+
+"And were you born in this country?"
+
+"I was a baby when they came over."
+
+"Well then, are you an American, or aren't you?  You don't really know,
+do you?  And you haven't enough interest in the country you've lived in
+fourteen years to find out--or to know what was the impulse that gave
+birth to our laws, the thing that makes an American different from a
+Norwegian, for instance.  The two people in the class who needed the
+preamble least are the ones that have learned it.  I'm disappointed.
+We'll go on to the lesson.  Reisenweber, what is a demesne?"
+
+Lydia sat looking from the teacher's face to Charlie Jackson, and from
+Charlie to the blond faces of the other pupils.  Vague wonderments were
+stirring in her mind; the beginnings of thoughts she never had had
+before.  Tramping home that night through the snowy road she had a new
+set of thoughts.  What had made her stiffen and at the same time feel
+sorry and ashamed when Charlie Jackson had said the Preamble was a lie
+for Indians!  And could she, could she possibly in the two weeks before
+Miss Towne's reception make herself a dress that would be presentable?
+
+Adam, slavering and slobbering, was waiting for her as usual by the
+front gate.  His deep brown eyes always showed phosphorescent glimmers
+of excitement when Lydia came.  He lunged up against her now with howls
+of delight and she knelt in the snow, as she always did, and hugged
+him.  Then he seized her book strap and lugged her Algebra and English
+Composition up to the house.
+
+Lizzie was as excited as Lydia when she heard of the invitation.
+
+"There's that gray serge of your mother's," she said.  "It's awful
+faded.  And there's a piece of a light blue serge waist she had, Lydia,
+let's get 'em dyed red.  Smitzky's will do it in a couple of days for
+us.  They did lots of work for me in bygone days and I'll pay for it
+out of the grocery money."
+
+"Do you think we can fix it so it won't look made over?" asked Lydia,
+torn between hope and doubt.
+
+"Of course we can.  You choose your pattern tomorrow and I'll get in to
+town in the morning with the goods, rheumatiz or no rheumatiz."
+
+Amos heard of the invitation with real pleasure.  Nor did the clothes
+problem trouble him.  "Pshaw, wear that green Sunday dress of yours.
+You always look nice, Lydia; whatever you wear.  And I'll take you up
+there and call for you.  If all the boys in school was running after
+you, I wouldn't let one of 'em beau you round before you was eighteen.
+So put that kind of a bee out of your bonnet for good and all."
+
+Lydia lived the next two weeks in the clouds.  The new-old dress was
+finished the day before the reception.  There had been minutes of
+despair in creating this festive garment.  The dyeing process had
+developed unsuspected moth holes.  The blue and the gray serge did not
+dye exactly the same shade, nor were they of quite the same texture.
+However, by twisting and turning and adding a yoke of black silk, which
+had for years been Lizzie's Sunday neck scarf, a result was produced
+that completely satisfied the little dressmaker and old Lizzie.
+
+Miss Towne was the only daughter of one of the old New England families
+of Lake City.  Teaching was an avocation with her and not a bread and
+butter necessity.  She lived in one of the fine old stone houses that
+crowned the lake shore near the college.  At eight o'clock on a
+Saturday evening, Amos left Lydia at the front door of the house, and
+in a few minutes Lydia was taking off her hat and coat in the midst of
+a chattering group of girls.  The pink organdy was there as well as the
+red silk,--so were blue organdies and white, as well as dainty slippers.
+
+After a general "Hello," Lydia slipped downstairs to find her hostess.
+Miss Towne, the grouchy, the strict and the stern Miss Towne, moving
+among her guests, saw the thin little figure hesitating in the doorway,
+saw the cobbled red dress, with skirt that was too short and sleeves
+that were too long and neck that was too tight, saw the carefully
+blacked school shoes, saw the intelligent high bred head nobly set on
+straight shoulders and the wonderful dusty gold of the curly hair, and
+the puzzled, bashful blue eyes.
+
+"Oh, Lydia!" cried the grouchy Miss Towne, "weren't you a dear to come
+clear into town for my party.  Mother---" this clearly for all the
+children to hear, "this is the pupil I've told you of, the one of whom
+we're all so proud.  Come over here, Lydia."
+
+Lydia moved carefully.  Her most moth eaten breadth was at the back and
+it was difficult to cross the room without unduly exposing that back.
+But she reached the safe haven of Miss Towne's side before the bevy of
+multi-colored organdies entered the room.
+
+Kent was there.  He had brought the pink organdy.  He waved a gay hand
+to Lydia, who waved back, gaily too.  Her cheeks were beginning to burn
+scarlet, partly because a real party was a wonderful thing and partly
+because of the multi-colored organdies.  Charlie Jackson was there.  He
+lived with Dr. Fulton as office boy and general helper and the doctor
+was clothing and educating him.  Charlie was half-back of the school
+football team, a famous player and a great favorite.  The girls flirted
+with him.  The boys were jealous of his favor.  Even in the snob-ridden
+High School there was here a hangover of the pure democracy of
+childhood.
+
+Miss Towne had provided games and refreshments bountifully.  The
+elocution teacher recited some monologues and the music teacher sang.
+But it was a difficult matter to entertain these youngsters already
+accustomed to a grown up social life.  Miss Towne had declared that
+there should be no dancing.  But the games were neglected and the
+guests stood about in frankly bored groups.  So when a bevy of
+organdies begged for permission to dance, Miss Towne, with obvious
+reluctance, gave in.
+
+From that moment, the party was an assured success.  Lydia, who had
+stuck like a little burr at Miss Towne's side all the evening, looked
+on with wonder and a growing lump in her throat.
+
+"Don't you dance, my dear?" asked Mrs. Towne.
+
+"Of course she doesn't, Mother," answered Miss Towne, "she's just a
+child.  There's time enough for those things after High School.  I
+don't know what's going to become of this generation."
+
+This was small comfort to Lydia, watching the pretty groups twirl by.
+
+Kent, hugging the pink organdy, stopped on the far side of the room
+from Lydia to get a drink of lemonade.
+
+"Isn't Lydia's dress a scream," said Olga.
+
+"Huh?" asked Kent in surprise.  He followed his partner's glance across
+the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE COOKING CLASS
+
+
+"We pines have been useful to man and so he has destroyed us."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia with parted lips and big, wistful eyes stood quietly beside Miss
+Towne.
+
+"What you giving us," said Kent.  "Red's my favorite color."
+
+"Red's all right," Olga tossed her head, "but that dress!  She ought to
+know better.  A five cent cheese cloth would have been better'n that."
+
+Kent was truly enamored of pretty Olga but he looked at her angrily.
+
+"You girls make me sick," he grunted and started dodging among the
+dancers, across the room to Lydia's side.  Olga stood pouting.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Charlie Jackson.
+
+"Oh, I just said Lydia's dress was a fright and Kent went off mad."
+
+Charlie in turn stared at Lydia.
+
+Kent in the meantime was grinning at Lydia amiably.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!  Want to dance?"
+
+"I can't.  Don't know how," replied Lydia, despondently.
+
+"Easy as anything.  Come on, I'll teach you."
+
+Lydia seized Kent's lapel with fingers that would tremble slightly.
+"Kent, I dassn't stir.  My back breadth don't match and my skirt hangs
+awful."
+
+"Oh, shucks!" replied Kent, angrily, "you girls are all alike.  Red's
+my favorite color."
+
+"Mine too," said Charlie Jackson at his elbow.  "What're you two
+arguing about?"
+
+"Her dress," growled Kent, "I don't see anything the matter with it, do
+you?"
+
+"Nope, and it's on the prettiest girl in the room too, eh, Kent?"
+
+"You bet," returned Kent, believing, though, that he lied, for Olga was
+as pretty as a tea rose.
+
+Lydia blushed and gasped.
+
+"If you won't dance, come on over and have some lemonade," suggested
+Kent.
+
+"If I sit in the window, will you bring me a glass?" asked Lydia, still
+mindful of the back breadth.
+
+"You take her to the window and I'll get the lemo, Kent," said Charlie.
+
+Kent led the way to the window-seat.  "You're a good old sport, Lyd,"
+he said.  "Charlie'll look out for you.  I gotta get back to Olga."
+
+he returned to make peace with the pink organdy.  She was very lovely
+and Kent was having his first flirtation.  Yet before he went to sleep
+that night the last picture that floated before his eyes was of a thin
+little figure with worn mittens clasped over patched knees and a
+ravished child's face looking into his.
+
+Charlie Jackson sat out two whole dances with Lydia.  Their talk was of
+Adam and of fishing.  Lydia longed to talk about Indians with him but
+didn't dare.  Promptly at ten, Amos appeared at the front door.
+
+Lydia's first party was over.  Amos and old Lizzie were charmed with
+Lydia's description of it and were sure she had had a wonderful time.
+But Lydia felt that the dress had made of the party a hideous failure.
+She knew now that she was marked among her mates as a poverty stricken
+little dowd whom popular boys like Kent and Charlie pitied.
+
+And yet because life is as kind to us as we have the intelligence to
+let it be, it was out of the party that grew slowly a new resolve of
+Lydia's--to have some day as pretty hands and as well shod feet as Olga
+and Hilda and Cissy, to learn how to make her dresses so that even the
+composing of an organdy might not be beyond her.
+
+They saw less of John Levine during the late winter and early spring.
+He was running for sheriff on the Republican ticket.  He was elected
+early in April by a comfortable majority and invited Amos and Lydia to
+a fine Sunday dinner in celebration at the best hotel in town.  Kent's
+father in April was promoted from a minor position in the office of the
+plow factory to the secretaryship of the company.  The family
+immediately moved to a better house over on the lake shore and it
+seemed to Lydia that Kent moved too, out of her life.
+
+She missed him less than might have been expected.  Her life was so
+different from that of any of the children that she knew, that growing
+into adolescence with the old bond of play disappearing, she fell back
+more and more on resources within herself.  This did not prevent her
+going faithfully once a month to call on Margery Marshall.  And these
+visits were rather pleasant than otherwise.  Margery was going through
+the paper doll fever.  Lydia always brought Florence Dombey with her
+and the two girls carried on an elaborate game of make-believe, the
+intricacies of which were entirely too much for Elviry Marshall,
+sitting within earshot.
+
+Elviry Marshall had two consuming passions in life--Margery and gossip.
+The questions she asked always irritated Lydia vaguely.
+
+"What wages is your Pa getting now, Lydia?"
+
+"Just the same, Mrs. Marshall."
+
+"Don't you pay Lizzie anything yet?"
+
+"No, Ma'am."
+
+"How much is your grocery bill this month?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Does your Pa ever talk about getting married again?"
+
+"No, Ma'am!  Oh, no, Ma'am!"
+
+Lizzie almost exploded with anger when Lydia retailed these questions,
+but Amos only laughed.
+
+"Pshaw, you know Elviry!"
+
+"Yes, I know Elviry!  She's a snake in the grass.  Always was and
+always will be."
+
+"She's a dandy housekeeper," murmured Lydia.  "I wonder where she
+learned.  And she isn't teaching Margery a thing.  I like Mr. Marshall."
+
+"Dave's a miser.  He always was and he always will be," snapped Lizzie.
+"I despise the whole kit and biling of them, money or no money.  Dave
+never earned an honest cent in his life."
+
+"Lots of rich men haven't," replied Amos.
+
+Amos' garden was a thing of beauty.  Its trim rows of vegetables were
+bordered with sunflowers, whose yellow heads vied in height with the
+rustling ears of corn.  Amos had a general grudge toward life.  He had
+a vague, unexpressed belief that because he was a descendant of the
+founders of the country, the world owed him an easy living.  He had a
+general sense of superiority to his foreign born neighbors and to the
+workmen in the plow factory.
+
+But in his garden, all his grudges disappeared.  Every evening until
+dark and every Sunday he worked away, whistling softly to himself.  He
+always felt nearer to his wife, in the garden.  She too had been bred
+on a New England farm.  He always felt as if the fine orderliness of
+the rows was for her.
+
+Lydia greatly preferred weeding the garden to cleaning the house.
+Indeed the contrast between the fine garden, the well kept patch of
+lawn and the disorderly house was startling.  Amos grumbled and
+complained but Lydia was in the hobble-de-hoy stage--she didn't care
+and she had no one teach her.
+
+One afternoon in August, clad in her bathing suit, now much too small
+for her, she was working in the garden, when a voice behind her grunted,
+
+"Eat!"
+
+Lydia jumped and turned.  The old squaw of two years before stood
+begging.  She was as pitifully thin as ever.  As she stared at the ugly
+old Indian, Lydia's throat tightened.  She seemed to feel baby
+Patience's fingers clinging to hers in fear.
+
+"Want some vegetables?" she asked, motioning toward the garden.
+
+The squaw nodded eagerly and held up the dirty apron she was wearing.
+Lydia began slowly to fill it, talking as she worked.
+
+"Where do you live?" she asked.
+
+The Indian jerked her gray head toward the north.  "Big Woods."'
+
+"But that's twenty miles.  It must take you a long time to walk it.
+Poor thing!"
+
+The squaw shrugged her shoulders.  Lydia stared at the toothless,
+trembling old mouth, hideous with wrinkles, then at the gnarled and
+shaking old hands.
+
+"Haven't you any one to take care of you?"
+
+"All sick--boy sick--man sick--girl sick.  All time sick, all time
+nothing to eat."
+
+"But won't some other Indian make you a garden, a little one?"
+
+Again the squaw shrugged her shoulders.  Her apron was full now.  She
+produced a string from inside her waist and tying the apron up
+bag-like, she slung it over her shoulder.  Then she gave Lydia a keen
+glance.
+
+"Friend," she said, briefly, and turning, she tottered painfully out of
+the gate.
+
+Followed by Adam, Lydia walked thoughtfully out upon the little pier
+Amos had built.  They had no boat, but Lydia fished and dived from the
+pier.  It was hard to understand how the Indians with all their rich
+pine land could be so poor.  She resolved to ask her father and Levine
+about it and turned a somersault into the water.  She swam about until
+tired, then turned over on her back to rest.  Lying so a shadow drifted
+across her face and she raised her head.  A gray birch bark canoe
+floated silently beside her.  In it, in a gray bathing suit, sat
+Charlie Jackson.
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia.  "How in the world you do it so quietly, I
+don't see."
+
+"I saw something that looked like a wet yellow pup in the water, and
+stole up on it," grinned Charlie.
+
+"Come on in.  It's as warm as suds."
+
+Charlie shot his canoe to the pier and in a moment, was floating beside
+Lydia.  She took a deep breath, let herself sink and a moment or two
+later came up several yards beyond him.  He did not miss her for a
+moment, then he started for her with a shout.  A game of tag followed
+ending in a wild race to the pier which they reached neck and neck.
+Adam wept and slobbered with joy over their return.
+
+"You certainly are a little sunfish in the water," panted Charlie, as
+they sat with feet dangling off the pier.
+
+"Ought to be, I'm in it enough," returned Lydia.  "Charlie, there's a
+poor old squaw came here to-day.  What's the matter with the Indians?
+Why don't they work?"
+
+Charlie turned to look at the white child, uneasily.  The two made a
+wonderful contrast.  Charlie was big and bronze and deep chested, with
+regular features although they were a little heavy.  Lydia, growing
+fast, was thinner than ever but cheeks and eyes were bright.
+
+Charlie's mouth twisted in a sneer.  "Why don't they work?  Why don't
+the whites give 'em a chance?  Dirty thieves, prowling round like
+timber wolves.  Ask Dave Marshall.  Ask that gumshoeing crook of a
+Levine.  Don't ask me."
+
+"Levine's not a crook," shouted Lydia.  "He's my friend."
+
+The sneer left Charlie's face and he laughed.  "Your friend is he,
+little sunfish!"
+
+"Yes," said Lydia, furiously.  "He gave me Adam," hugging the dog's
+ugly, faithful head.  He immediately tried to sit in her wet lap.  "And
+he's done as much for me as my own father."
+
+"If he's your friend," said the Indian gently, "I won't speak against
+him to you again."
+
+Lydia instantly was mollified.  Charlie was so old and so young!  He
+was so different from Kent that staring into his deep black eyes, Lydia
+suddenly felt his alien race.
+
+"I must go in and dress," she said.  "It's time to get supper."
+
+Charlie nodded and untied his canoe.  After he was seated with paddle
+lifted, he glanced up at her mischievously.
+
+"You're a very nice little girl," he said; "I shall come again.  You
+may call me Uncle Charlie."
+
+Lydia put out her tongue at him.  "Good-by, Uncle!" she called and
+raced up the bank to the house.
+
+"Daddy," she said that night at supper, "why should Mr. Marshall and
+Charlie Jackson both say Mr. Levine is a crook?"
+
+Amos ate a piece of bread meditatively before replying.  "Any man that
+goes into politics in this country leaves his reputation behind him.
+You and I'll never have a better friend than John Levine."
+
+Lydia nodded.  She was only a child after all and still retained
+implicit faith in the opinion of those she loved.  She went back to
+school that fall full of interest and importance.  She was a sophomore
+now and very proud of the fact that she knew the ropes.  Her
+arrangement with Billy held for his second year books.  With much
+pinching of the grocery money, Lizzie had achieved two new galatea
+sailor suits and so while she felt infinitely inferior to the
+elaborately gowned young misses of her grade, Lydia was not unhappy.
+
+There was a new course of study offered the pupils this year.  It was
+called the Cookery Course and was elective, not required.  Lydia turned
+her small nose up at it.  She was a good cook, without study, she told
+herself.  But Miss Towne thought differently.  She called Lydia into
+her room one day, early in the term.  "Lydia, why don't you take the
+Cooking Course?"
+
+"I can cook, Miss Towne.  I do all our cooking and Daddy says I'm fine
+at it."
+
+"I know, my dear, but there are other things connected with the Course
+that you need."
+
+"What things?" asked Lydia, a trine obstinately.
+
+"That's what I want you to find out for yourself.  Come, Lydia, take my
+word for it.  It's only two hours a week and no outside study required.
+If after a term of it, you still think it's useless, why drop it."
+
+So behold Lydia entered in the Cooking Course which was not popular.
+The mothers of the majority of the girls did not, they said, send their
+daughters to school to be taught kitchen service.  But by the efforts
+of Miss Towne and one or two other teachers, a dozen children ranging
+in age from fourteen to eighteen, with Lydia as the infant of the
+class, were enticed into the bright model kitchen in the basement.
+
+It was not long after this that Lydia said to her father, one evening,
+
+"Daddy, I've got to have twenty-five cents."
+
+Amos looked up from his newspaper.  "What for, Lydia?  A quarter's a
+good deal of money.  Takes me pretty near two hours to earn it."
+
+"I know it," answered Lydia, wincing, "but I've got to buy a nail file.
+You ought to see my hands compared with the other girls.  And you ought
+to see dirty finger nails under the microscope.  The cooking school
+teacher showed us before we made bread, today."
+
+Amos looked at Lydia thoughtfully for a moment, then he carefully
+abstracted a quarter from his pocket, laid it on the table and went
+back to his reading.
+
+Lydia planned a real feast for Thanksgiving.  She negotiated with Billy
+Norton for the exchange of two pounds of fudge for a brace of wild
+duck.  The Saturday before Thanksgiving, she gave the house its usual
+"lick and promise" and then started out with her skates to enjoy the
+first ice of the season.
+
+She had a glorious morning.  There was no snow and the lake had frozen
+crystal clear.  The air was breathless.  As she skated she chanted, to
+improvised tunes, bits of verse.
+
+  "The stag at eve had drunk his fill
+  Where danced the moon on Monan's rill
+  And deep his midnight lair had laid
+  In lone Glenartney's hazel shade.
+
+  "I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris and he,
+  I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.
+  'Good speed!' cried the watch as the gate bolts undrew,
+  'Speed' echoed the wall to us galloping through."
+
+She hunted through Scottish mountains and moors, she whirled from Ghent
+to Aix and still high hearted and in the land of visions, took off her
+skates and entered the house.  She banged the door, then stood for a
+moment staring.  Elviry and Margery were seated before the living-room
+stove, while old Lizzie sat on one edge of Amos' arm chair eyeing the
+two belligerently.
+
+Margery was wearing a new fur coat.  Her beautiful black eyes looked
+out from under a saucy fur-trimmed hat with a scarlet quill on the
+side.  Elviry wore black broadcloth with fox collar and muff.  Lydia,
+in a remodeled coat of her mother's, and her old Tam and mended
+mittens, recovered from her surprise quickly.
+
+"Hello!" she said.  "When did you come?  This is the first time you've
+ever been in our house, Mrs. Marshall, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," replied Elviry, "and," with a glance at Lizzie, "I wouldn't be
+here now if Mr. Marshall hadn't made me."
+
+"Oh, Mamma," protested Margery, "I wanted to come."
+
+"You hush up, Margery!  What I came for is that Mr. Marshall would like
+to have the three of you come to our house for Thanksgiving dinner."
+
+Lydia suddenly giggled.  "Don't worry, Mrs. Marshall, we can't come.
+We're going to have company ourselves for Thanksgiving."
+
+Elviry gave a huge sigh of relief.  "Well, that's too bad," she said.
+"We're going to have a grand dinner, too."
+
+"So are we," retorted Lydia.
+
+"How's Florence Dombey?" asked Margery.  "Mamma, can't I stay and play
+with Lydia a while?"
+
+"We'll stay a few minutes," said Elviry, loosing her furs and settling
+back in her chair.  "It's a real small place, Lizzie, but you can do so
+little work now, I s'pose it's just as well."
+
+Lydia had produced a pasteboard shoe box of paper dolls which she gave
+to Margery.  She cuddled Florence Dombey in her arms and gave one ear
+to Margery's question as to the names and personalities of the paper
+dolls, the other to Elviry's comments.
+
+"It ain't so small," sniffed Lizzie.  "It's bigger'n anything you ever
+lived in, Elviry, till Dave sold enough lumber he stole from the
+Government to start a bank."
+
+Elviry was not to be drawn into a quarrel.  "You always was a jealous
+body, Lizzie.  That old mahogany belonged to both Amos and his wife's
+folks, I've heard.  Why don't you get rid of it and buy more of this
+here new Mission stuff that's coming in?  Though I suppose you'd better
+wait till Lydia's old enough to take more interest in keeping the house
+clean.  Butter's awful high this winter.  How much does your grocery
+bill average, Lizzie?"
+
+"None of your business," replied Lizzie.
+
+"I don't think Imogen is as good looking as Marion.  I'd rather have
+Marion marry Prince Rupert, then these can be their children," Margery
+murmured on.
+
+"Land, Lizzie, don't be so cross," said Elviry.  "I suppose you've
+heard the talk about John Levine?  He's getting in with that half breed
+crowd up on the reservation that the Indian agent's such friends with.
+They say Levine's land hungry enough to marry a squaw.  He's so dark, I
+wouldn't be surprised if he had Indian blood himself.  Land knows
+nothing would surprise me about him.  They say he's just naturally
+crooked."
+
+Lydia and Florence Dombey suddenly stood in front of Elviry.
+
+"Don't you say such things about Mr. Levine," said Lydia slowly, cheeks
+bright, eyes as blue as Florence Dombey's.
+
+"Well!" exclaimed Elviry, beginning to pull her furs up, "I don't seem
+to be able to please you two with my conversation, so I'll be going.
+Margery, get up off that dirty floor.  I never cared much about Amos'
+wife, she was too proud, but at least she was clean.  She'd turn over
+in her grave if she knew what this house looked like.  Come, Margery,
+the horse will be cold, standing so long."
+
+Lizzie opened her mouth to speak but Lydia shook her head, and the two
+stood in silence, watching the departure of the visitors.  When the
+door had closed Lizzie burst forth in an angry tirade, but Lydia only
+half listened.  She looked slowly around the living-room, then walked
+into the dining-room and thence into the kitchen.  She opened the
+pantry door and stared at the dust and disorder, the remnants of food,
+the half washed dishes.  Suddenly she thought of the shining and
+orderly kitchen in the High School basement.  Supposing the cooking
+teacher should come out to supper, sometime!  Lydia had asked her to
+come.
+
+She came slowly back into the living-room.  Old Lizzie was replenishing
+the stove, still muttering to herself.  Lydia observed for the first
+time that her apron was dirty.  Thinking it over, she could not recall
+ever having seen Lizzie with a clean apron.  A deep sense of shame
+suddenly enveloped Lydia.
+
+"Oh, I wish some one had taught me," she groaned.  "I wish mother had
+lived.  Everybody has to go and die on me!  I suppose Lizzie and Dad'll
+be next.  Adam helps to keep the house dirty.  There's dog hair
+everywhere."
+
+"Don't you get worked up over Elviry Marshall, child," said Lizzie.
+
+"I hate her," exclaimed Lydia, "but what she said about the house is
+true.  Anyhow, I've learned how to clean pantry shelves, so here goes."
+
+She tied one of Lizzie's aprons round her neck, pushed a chair into the
+pantry and began her unsavory task.  It was dusk when she finished and
+led Lizzie out to observe the shiny, sweet smelling orderliness of the
+place.
+
+"Land, it does make a difference!  If the rheumatiz didn't take all the
+ambition out of me, I'd keep it that way for you," said the old lady.
+
+"I'll do it, every Saturday.  Gosh, I'm tired!" groaned Lydia, throwing
+herself on the living-room couch.  "Lizzie, give me some of your mutton
+tallow to rub on my hands.  The cooking teacher says it's fine for
+hands."
+
+Lydia lay in the twilight, watching the coals glow in the base burner,
+while the aroma of the baked beans and brown bread Lizzie was tending
+in the kitchen floated in to her.  Adam lay on the floor by the stove,
+where he could keep one drowsy eye on her every motion.  She was
+thinking of her mother and of little Patience.  She could think of them
+now without beginning to tremble.  She tried to picture every detail of
+her mother's face.  They had no picture of her nor of the baby, and
+Lydia was afraid she would forget.  She wondered if they were together,
+if they knew how hard she was trying to obey her mother's injunction to
+"make something" of herself.  "Be a lady!"  "Never be coarse."  There
+was nobody to show her things, she thought.  How could she ever learn
+to be a lady?  "If I believed in praying any more, I'd pray about lots
+of things," she thought, sadly.  "But either there isn't any God, or
+else He don't believe in prayer, Himself.  Gee, supper smells good.
+I'm awful hungry.  I wonder why Mrs. Marshall hates me so.  I suppose
+because I'm such a common kid and she still thinks I almost drowned
+Margery.  And I don't believe a word she says about Mr. Levine, either.
+Hateful old beast!  If I believed in prayer, you bet I'd tell God a few
+things about her."
+
+The highly satisfactory Thanksgiving feast was eaten and praised.  The
+dishes were washed and set away in the immaculate pantry, and Amos and
+John Levine were smoking by the fire.
+
+"Seems to me this room looks all slicked up," said Levine.
+
+Amos nodded.  "Lydia's coming along.  Says the cooking school teacher
+told her to sprinkle wet tea leaves over the carpet before sweeping to
+keep down the dust.  Place was like a cyclone this morning for an hour,
+but the result pays.  She's growing like her mother."
+
+"She's only a child, and small for her age, at that," said John.  "It's
+a shame for her to work so hard."
+
+"I know it," answered Amos, "but what can I do?  On a dollar and a half
+a day--I swan--"
+
+There was a rap on the door.  Lizzie admitted Dave Marshall and Margery.
+
+"Out for a tramp as a digester," explained Dave.  "Came to call on my
+friend Lydia.  I ain't seen her for ages."
+
+He and Levine nodded to each other.  Amos shook hands and Dave kissed
+Lydia, catching a dark scowl on Levine's face as he did so.
+
+"Let's play paper dolls," said Margery, as soon as she had pulled off
+her coat.
+
+"You play 'em," replied Lydia, "I'm awful tired."
+
+"Why should a baby like you be tired?" inquired Marshall, pulling her
+to his side as he seated himself in Amos' arm chair.
+
+"If you'd tasted our dinner," said Amos, "you'd know why she and Lizzie
+should be half dead."
+
+"I wish I could 'a' tasted it," replied Marshall.  "Have a smoke,
+friends?"
+
+Amos took a cigar but Levine refused.
+
+"Come, John, come," said the stout banker, banteringly.  "This is a
+legal holiday and you and I at least agree on Lydia.  Let's stop war
+for the day, eh?"
+
+Levine's sallow face hardened, then he caught Lydia's blue gaze on him
+as she stood beside Marshall.  It was such a transparent, trusting
+gaze, so full of affection, so obviously appealing to him to "be nice,"
+that in spite of himself he grinned and took a cigar.
+
+Amos settled back with a sigh of satisfaction.  He enjoyed company and
+had had no one but John since his wife's death.
+
+"Looks as if the country'd go Republican next fall," he said by way of
+starting a conversation.
+
+"I don't see why," returned Marshall, who was a Democrat.
+
+"Folks are sick of Democratic graft," said Levine.
+
+"And Republicans think it's their turn, eh?" inquired Marshall.  "Well,
+maybe it is, maybe it is!"
+
+Amos laughed genially.  "Satisfied with your share, Dave?"
+
+"Got my eye on just one more little mite.  Just one little mite, then
+I'm through," chuckled Marshall.
+
+"Then you good Republicans can get your feet into the trough."
+
+"Co-ee!  Lydia!" came a call from the lake shore.
+
+Lydia ran to the kitchen door.  Charlie Jackson and Kent were skating
+up to the bank.
+
+"Come out for a while," cried Kent.
+
+"I can't.  I've got company.  Come on up and get warm," returned Lydia.
+
+The two boys slipped off their skates and came up to the cottage.  Kent
+needed no introduction, and Lydia made short work of Charlie by saying
+to the assemblage at large, "This is Charlie Jackson.  Come on up by
+the stove, boys."
+
+The boys established themselves on the couch back of the baseburner.
+
+"Hello, Marg," said Kent.  "What you doing?"
+
+"Paper dolls," returned Margery from her corner, without looking up.
+Charlie Jackson stared at the beautiful little black head bent over the
+bright colored bits of paper with interest.
+
+Amos took up the interrupted conversation.  "If we could get a
+Republican Congress, that block o' pine and black loam twenty miles
+north would be given to its rightful owners."
+
+"Meaning the full bloods, I suppose," said Levine with a short laugh.
+
+"Yes--full blooded whites," returned Amos.
+
+Charlie Jackson suddenly threw back his head and rose.
+
+"I'm a full blood Indian," he said, quietly.  The three men looked at
+him as if they saw him for the first time.
+
+"Well, what of it?" asked Marshall, shortly.
+
+"This of it," said Charlie, tensely, "that you whites with your
+Constitution and your Declaration of Independence are a lot of liars
+and thieves."
+
+Marshall turned purple, but John Levine spoke quickly.  "Easy there, my
+boy!  You're talking of things you don't understand."
+
+"Oh, but he does," interrupted Lydia eagerly.  "'Governments derive
+their just powers from the consent of the governed.'  We had it in
+school.  It must mean Indians too."
+
+John Levine laughed.  "There you have it.  And Charlie is right, we are
+liars and thieves, but we have to be.  Might is right in this world."
+
+"Speak for yourself, Levine," cried Marshall.
+
+"Levine!" exploded Charlie.  "Are you Levine?  You're the man then that
+my sister--" his voice rose to a shout.  "I'll beat the face off of you
+right now."
+
+And he made a sudden spring for the astonished Levine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE
+
+
+"Nature counts no day as wasted."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Amos and Kent caught Charlie by either arm as his hands clutched for
+Levine's throat.  Marshall did not stir out of his chair.  During the
+remainder of the episode his face wore a complacent expression that,
+though Lydia did not consciously observe it at the time, returned to
+her in after years with peculiar significance.
+
+"Here!  Here!  This won't do, my young Indian!" cried Amos.
+
+"Let me get at him!" panted Charlie.
+
+Lydia moved away from Lizzie and Margery.  The three had automatically
+jumped to grab Adam's collar for Adam always assisted in a fight, human
+or otherwise.  She ran over to the Indian.
+
+"Charlie," she pleaded, looking up into his face, "you mustn't hurt Mr.
+Levine.  He's my best friend.  And it is not polite to come to call at
+my house and make a row, this way."
+
+"That's right," commented Marshall.  "Do your fighting outdoors."
+
+John had not stirred from his chair.  He looked up at the Indian and
+said slowly and insolently, "Get out of here!  You know what I can do
+to you, don't you?  Well, get out before I do it!"
+
+Charlie returned John's look of contempt with one of concentrated
+hatred.  Then he turned to Kent.
+
+"Come on, Kent," he growled and followed by his friend, he marched out
+of the kitchen door.
+
+"Whew!" said Amos, "talk about civilizing Indians!"
+
+Lydia was trembling violently.  "What made him act so----  _Did_ you
+hurt his sister, Mr. Levine?"
+
+"Didn't even know he had a sister," returned John, coolly relighting
+his cigar.
+
+Marshall rose and stretched his fat body.  "Well, you serve up too much
+excitement for me, Amos.  I'll be getting along.  Come, Margery."
+
+"Wait and we'll all have some coffee," said Lizzie.  "Land, I'm all
+shook up."
+
+"Pshaw! 'twan't anything.  Kent should have had more sense than to
+bring him in here," said Levine.
+
+"Why, he's usually perfectly lovely," protested Lydia.  "Goes to
+parties with the girls and everything."
+
+"I wouldn't go to a party with a dirty Indian," said Margery, her nose
+up in the air.
+
+"What do you know about parties, chicken?" asked Marshall, buttoning
+her coat for her.
+
+"Mama says I can go next year when I enter High School," replied
+Margery.
+
+"First boy, white or Indian, that comes to call on you before you're
+eighteen, I'll turn the hose on," said Dave, winking at the men.
+
+Amos and John laughed and Dave made his exit in high good humor.
+
+When the door had closed Amos said, "Any real trouble with the boy,
+John?"
+
+"Shucks, no!" returned Levine.  "Forget it!"
+
+And forget it they did while the November dusk drew to a close and the
+red eyes of the stove blinked a warmer and warmer glow.  About eight
+o'clock, after a light supper, Levine started back for town.  He had
+not been gone five minutes when a shot cracked through the breathless
+night air.
+
+Amos started for the door but Lizzie grasped his arm.  "You stay right
+here, Amos, and take care of the house."
+
+"What do you s'pose it was?" whispered Lydia.  "I wish Mr. Levine was
+here.  He's sheriff."
+
+"That's what I'm afraid of--that something's happened, to him--between
+his being sheriff and his other interests.  I'll get my lantern."
+
+"Wait!  I'll have to fill it for you," said Lydia.
+
+So it was that while Amos fumed and Lydia sought vainly for a new wick,
+footsteps sounded on the porch, the door opened and Billy Norton and
+his father supported John Levine into the living-room.  Levine's
+overcoat showed a patch of red on the right breast.
+
+"For God's sake!  Here, put him on the couch," gasped Amos.
+
+"Billy, take Levine's bicycle and get the doctor here," said Pa Norton.
+
+"Hot water and clean cloth, Lydia," said Amos.  "Let's get his clothes
+off, Norton."
+
+"Don't touch me except to cut open my clothes and pack the wound with
+ice in a pad of rags," said John weakly.  Then he closed his eyes and
+did not speak again till the doctor came.
+
+Lydia trembling violently could scarcely carry the crushed ice from
+Lizzie to her father.  No one spoke until the gentle oozing of the
+blood yielded to the freezing process.  Then Amos said in a low voice
+to Pa Norton,
+
+"What happened?"
+
+"Can't say.  Billy and I were coming home from town when we heard the
+shot ahead of us.  It took us a minute or two to come up to Levine.  He
+was standing dazed like, said the shot had come from the lake shore way
+and that's all he knew about it."
+
+The beat of horses' hoofs on the frozen ground broke the silence that
+followed.  In a moment Dr. Fulton ran into the room.  Lydia seized
+Florence Dombey and hurried to the kitchen, nor did she leave her
+station in the furthest corner until the door closed softly after the
+doctor.  Amos came out into the kitchen and got a drink at the water
+pail.
+
+"Doc got the bullet," said Amos.  "Grazed the top of the lungs and came
+to the surface near the backbone.  Lord, that was a narrow escape!"
+
+"Will he--will he die?" whispered Lydia.
+
+"Of course not," answered Amos, with a quick glance at the blanched
+little face.  "He's got to have good nursing and he can't be moved.
+Lizzie's as good a nurse as any one could want.  Doctor'll be back at
+midnight and stay the rest of the night."
+
+"Who did it, Daddy?"
+
+Amos shook his head.  "It might have been Charlie Jackson or it might
+have been a dozen others.  A sheriff's liable to have plenty of
+enemies.  Billy started a bunch hunting."
+
+Lydia shivered.
+
+"Go to bed, child," said Amos.  "We're going to be busy in this house
+for a while."
+
+"I want to see him first, please, Daddy."
+
+"Just a peek then, don't make a noise."
+
+Already the living room had a sick room aspect.  The light was lowered
+and the table was littered with bandages and bottles.  Lydia crept up
+to the couch and stood looking down at the gaunt, quiet figure.
+
+John opened his eyes and smiled faintly.  "Making you lots of trouble,
+young Lydia."
+
+"Oh, no!" exclaimed Lydia.  "Just get well, we don't mind the trouble."
+
+"I've got to get well, so's you and I can travel," whispered Levine.
+"Good night, dear."
+
+Lydia swallowed a sob.  "Good night," she said.
+
+At first, Amos planned to have Lydia stay out of school to help, but
+Levine grew so feverishly anxious when he heard of this that the idea
+was quickly given up and Ma Norton and a neighbor farther up the road
+arranged to spend the days turn about, helping Lizzie.
+
+As soon as the shooting was known, there was a deluge of offers of
+help.  All the organizations to which Levine belonged as well as his
+numerous acquaintances were prodigal in their offers of every kind of
+assistance.
+
+But John fretfully refused.  He would have no nurse but Lizzie, share
+no roof but Amos'.  "You're the only folks I got," he told Amos again
+and again.
+
+The shooting was a seven days' wonder, but no clue was found as to the
+identity of the would-be assassin.  Charlie Jackson had spent the
+evening with Kent.  As the monotony of Levine's convalescence came on,
+gossip and conjecture lost interest in him.  John himself would not
+speak of the shooting.
+
+It was after Christmas before John was able to sit up in Amos' arm
+chair and once more take a serious interest in the world about him.
+Lydia, coming home from school, would find Adam howling with joy at the
+gate and John, pale and weak but fully dressed, watching for her from
+his arm chair by the window.  The two had many long talks, in the early
+winter dusk before Lydia started her preparations for supper.  One of
+these particularly, the child never forgot.
+
+"Everybody acted queer about Charlie Jackson, at first," said Lydia,
+"but now you're getting well, they're all just as crazy about him as
+ever."
+
+"He'll kill some one in a football scrimmage yet," was John's comment.
+
+"No, the boys say he never loses his temper.  The rest of them do.  I
+wish girls played football.  I bet I'd make a good quarterback."
+
+John laughed weakly but delightedly.  "You must weigh fully a hundred
+pounds!  Why, honey, they'd trample a hundred pounds to death!"
+
+"They would not!"  Lydia's voice was indignant.  "And just feel my
+muscles.  I get 'em from swimming."
+
+John ran his hand over the proffered shoulders and arm.  "My goodness,"
+he said in astonishment.  "Those muscles are like tiny steel springs.
+Well, what else would you like to be besides quarterback, Lydia?"
+
+"When I was a little girl I was crazy to be an African explorer.  And
+I'd still like to be, only I know that's not sensible.  Adam, for
+Pete's sake get off my feet."
+
+Adam gave a slobbery sigh and withdrew a fraction of an inch.  Levine
+watched Lydia in the soft glow of the lamp light.  Her hair was still
+the dusty yellow of babyhood but it was long enough now to hang in soft
+curls in her neck after she had tied it back with a ribbon.  She was
+still wearing the sailor suits, and her face was still thin and
+childish for all she was a sophomore.
+
+"I don't suppose you could explore," said Levine, meditatively.
+
+"Oh, I could, if I had the money to outfit with, but I'll tell you what
+I really would like best of all."  Lydia hitched her chair closer to
+Levine and glanced toward the kitchen where Lizzie was knitting and
+warming her feet in the oven.  "I'd like to own an orphan asylum.  And
+I'd get the money to run it with from a gold mine.  I would find a mine
+in New Mexico.  I know I could if I could just get out there."
+
+"Seems to me all your plans need money," suggested John.
+
+"Yes, that's the trouble with them," admitted Lydia, with a sigh.  "And
+I'll always be poor--I'm that kind."
+
+"What are you really going to do with yourself, Lydia, pipe dreams
+aside?"
+
+"Well, first I'm going to get an education, clear up through the
+University.  'Get an education if you have to scrub the streets to do
+it,' was what Mother always said.  'You can be a lady and be poor,' she
+said, 'but you can't be a lady and use poor English.'  And then I'm
+going to be as good a housekeeper as Mrs. Marshall and I'm going to
+dress as well as Olga Reinhardt, and have as pretty hands as Miss
+Towne.  And I'm never going to move out of the home I make.  Maybe I'll
+get married.  I suppose I'll have to 'cause I want at least six
+children, and some one's got to support them.  And I'll want to travel
+a good deal."
+
+"Travel takes money," John reminded her.
+
+"Not always.  There was The Man Without a Country, but I wouldn't want
+to have what he had.  Seems to me it was a little thing he said after
+all.  Mr. Levine, why did he feel so terrible about the poem?"
+
+"What poem?" asked Levine.
+
+Lydia cleared her throat.
+
+  "'Breathes there a man with soul so dead
+  Who never to himself hath said
+  This is my own, my native land?'
+
+--and you know the rest."
+
+John Levine looked at Lydia strangely.  There was a moment's pause,
+then she said, "But I don't understand just what it all means."
+
+"Lots of us don't," commented John, briefly.  "But if I had a son I'd
+beat understanding of it into him with a hickory club."
+
+Lydia's jaw dropped.  "But--but wouldn't you beat it into your
+daughter?"
+
+"What's the use of trying to teach patriotism to anything female?"
+There was a contemptuous note in Levine's voice that touched Lydia's
+temper.
+
+"Well, there's plenty of use, I'd have you know!" she cried.  "Why, I
+was more interested in Civil Government last year than any of the boys
+except Charlie Jackson."
+
+Levine laughed, then said soberly, "All right, Lydia, I'd be glad to
+see what you can do for your country.  When you get that orphan asylum,
+put over the door, 'Ducit Amor Patriae.'"
+
+Lydia looked at him clearly.  "You just wait and see."
+
+She went soberly toward the kitchen for her apron, and Levine looked
+after her with an expression at once wistful and gentle.  Lydia looked
+up "Ducit Amor Patriae" in a phrase book the next day.  She liked the
+sound of it.
+
+By the middle of January, Levine was sufficiently recovered to leave.
+The Saturday before he left occurred another conversation between him
+and Lydia that cemented still further the quaint friendship of the two.
+
+It snowed heavily all day.  Lydia had put in the morning as usual
+cleaning the house.  This was a very methodical and thorough process
+now, and when it was finished the cottage shone with cleanliness.  In
+the afternoon, she dug a path to the gate, played a game of tag in the
+snow with Adam, then, rosy and tired, established herself in Amos' arm
+chair with a book.  Lizzie was taking a long nap.  The dear old soul
+had been exhausted by the nursing.  Levine lay on the couch and finally
+asked Lydia to read aloud to him.  She was deep in "The Old Curiosity
+Shop" and was glad to share it with her friend.
+
+During the remainder of the afternoon John watched the snowflakes or
+Lydia's sensitive little red face and listened to the immortal story.
+
+Suddenly he was astonished to hear Lydia's voice tremble.  She was
+reading of little Nell's last sickness.  "She was dead.  Dear, patient,
+noble Nell was dead.  No sleep so beautiful and calm.  She seemed a
+creature fresh from the hand of God.  Not one who had lived and
+suffered death."
+
+Lydia suddenly broke off, bowed her yellow head on the book and broke
+into deep, long drawn sobs that were more like a woman's than a child's.
+
+John rose as quickly as he could.  "My dearest!" he exclaimed.  "What's
+the matter?"  He pulled her from the arm chair, seated himself, then
+drew her to his knees.
+
+"I can't bear it!" sobbed Lydia.  "I can't.  Seems sometimes if I
+couldn't have little Patience again I'd die!  That's the way she looked
+in her coffin, you remember?  'F-fresh from the hand of God--not one
+who h-had lived and s-suffered death.'  O my little, little sister!"
+
+John took "The Old Curiosity Shop" from the trembling fingers and flung
+it upon the couch.  Then he gathered Lydia in his arms and hushed her
+against his heart.
+
+"Sweetheart!  Sweetheart!  Why, I didn't realize you still felt so!
+Think how happy Patience must be up there with God and her mother!  You
+wouldn't wish her back!"
+
+"If I believed that I could stand it--but there isn't any God!"
+
+Levine gasped.  "Lydia!  Hush now!  Stop crying and tell me about it."
+
+He rocked slowly back and forth, patting her back and crooning to her
+until the sobs stopped.
+
+"There!" he said.  "And what makes you think there's no God, dear?"
+
+"If there was a God, He'd answer prayers.  Or He'd give some sign."
+Lydia lifted a tear-stained face from John's shoulder.  "He's never
+paid any attention to me," she said tensely.  "I've tried every way to
+make Him hear.  Sometimes in the dusk, I've taken Adam and we've gone
+deep into the woods and I've sat and thought about Him till--till there
+was nothing else in the world but my thought of Him.  And I never got a
+sign.  And I've floated on my back in the lake looking up into the sky
+trying to make myself believe He was there--and I couldn't.  All I knew
+was that Mother and Patience were dead and in coffins in the ground."
+
+Levine's sallow face was set with pain.  "Why, child, this isn't right.
+You're too young for such thoughts!  Lydia, do you read the Bible?"
+
+She nodded.  "I've tried that too--but Jesus might have believed
+everything He said was true, yet there mightn't have been a word of
+truth in it.  Do you believe in God?"
+
+John's hold on the thin hands tightened.  He stared long and
+thoughtfully at the snowflakes sifting endlessly past the window.
+
+"Lydia," he said, at last.  "I'll admit that my faith in the hereafter
+and in an All-seeing God has been considerably shaken as I've grown
+older.  But I'll admit too, that I've refused to give the matter much
+thought.  I tell you what I'll do.  Let's you and I start on our first
+travel trip, right now!  Let's start looking for God, together.  He's
+there all right, my child.  But you and I don't seem to be able to use
+the ordinary paths to get to Him.  So we'll hack out our own trail, eh?
+And you'll tell me what your progress is--and where you get lost--and
+I'll tell you.  It may take us years, but we'll get there, by heck!
+Eh, young Lydia?"
+
+Lydia looked into the deep black eyes long and earnestly.  And as she
+looked there stole into her heart a sense of companionship, of
+protection, of complete understanding, that spread like a warm glow
+over her tense nerves.  It was a sense that every child should grow up
+with, yet that Lydia had not known since her mother's death.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, "I feel happier already.  Of course we'll find Him.
+I'll begin my hunt to-morrow."
+
+John smoothed her tumbled hair gently.  "We're great friends, aren't
+we, Lydia!  I've an idea you'll always believe in me no matter what
+folks say, eh?"
+
+"You bet!" replied Lydia solemnly.
+
+John Levine went back to his duties as sheriff and Lydia and Amos and
+Lizzie missed him for a long time.  But gradually life fell back into
+the old routine and spring, then summer, were on them almost before
+they realized winter was gone.
+
+Lydia did well at school, though she still was an isolated little
+figure among her schoolmates.  The cooking teacher added sewing to the
+course, after Christmas, and Lydia took up "over and over stitch" at
+the point where her gentle mother had left off five years before.  She
+progressed so famously that by the time school closed she had learned
+how to use a shirtwaist pattern and how to fit a simple skirt.  With
+her plans for a summer of dress-making she looked with considerable
+equanimity on the pretty spring wardrobes of her schoolmates.
+
+They saw less than ever of Levine when summer came, for he was
+beginning his campaign for Congressman.  He came out occasionally on
+Sunday and then he and Lydia would manage a little stroll in the woods
+or along the lake shore when they would talk over their progress in the
+Spiritual Traveling they had undertaken in January.  Lydia had decided
+to give the churches a chance and was deliberately attending one Sunday
+School after another, studying each one with a child's simple sincerity.
+
+One source of relief to Lydia during the summer was that Mrs. Marshall
+and Margery spent two months in the East.  Lydia had faithfully kept in
+touch with Margery ever since her promise had been given to Dave
+Marshall.  But she did not like the banker's daughter--nor her mother.
+So again as far as playmates were concerned Lydia spent a solitary
+summer.
+
+Yet she was not lonely.  Never before had the lake seemed so beautiful
+to her.  Sitting on the little pier with Adam while her father worked
+in his garden, she watched the sunset across the water, night after
+night.  There was nothing that seemed to bring her nearer to a sense of
+God than this.  Night after night the miracle, always the same, always
+different.  The sun slipped down behind the distant hills, the clouds
+turned purple in the Western hill tops, fading toward the zenith to an
+orange that turned to azure as she watched.  The lake beneath painted
+the picture again, with an added shimmer, a more mysterious glow.
+Little fish flashed like flecks of gold from the water, dropping back
+in a shower of amethyst.  Belated dragon flies darted home.  And the
+young girl watching, listening, waiting, felt her spirit expand to a
+demand greater than she could answer.
+
+Amos was keenly interested in Levine's campaign.  His attitude toward
+politics was curiously detached, when one considered that he was
+saturated with information--both as to state and national politics.  He
+was vicious in his criticism of the Democrats, ardent in his support of
+the Republicans, yet it never seemed to occur to him that it was his
+political duty to do anything more than talk.  He seemed to feel that
+his ancestors in helping to launch the government had forever relieved
+him from any duty more onerous than that of casting a vote.
+
+He did, however, take Lydia one September evening just before school
+opened to hear John make a speech in the Square.  Lydia up to this time
+had given little heed to the campaign, but she was delighted with the
+unwonted adventure of being away from home in the evening.
+
+It was a soft, moonlit night.  The old Square, filled with giant elms,
+was dotted with arc lights that threw an undulating light on the gray
+mass of the Capitol building.  When Amos and Lydia arrived the Square
+was full of a laughing, chattering crowd.  Well dressed men and women
+from the University and the lake shore, workingmen, smoking black
+pipes, pushing baby carriages, while their wives in Sunday best hung on
+their arms.  Young boys and girls of Lydia's age chewed gum and
+giggled.  Older boys and girls kept to the shadows of the elms and
+whispered.  On the wooden platform extended from the granite steps of
+the Capitol, a band dispensed dance music and patriotic airs, breaking
+into "America" as Levine made his way to the front of the platform.
+
+Almost instantly the crowd became quiet.  A curious sort of tenseness
+became apparent as Levine began to speak.
+
+Lydia stared up at him.  He looked very elegant to her in his frock
+coat and gray trousers.  She was filled with pride at the thought of
+how close and dear he was to her.  She wished that the folk about her
+realized that she and her shabby father were intimate with the hero of
+the evening.
+
+The first part of the address interested Lydia very little.  It
+concerned the possibility of a new Post Office for Lake City and made
+numerous excursions into the matter of free trade.  It did not seem to
+Lydia that in spite of their attitude of tenseness, the people around
+her were much more interested than she.
+
+Then of a sudden Levine launched his bolt.
+
+"But after all," he said, "my friends, what is free trade or a new Post
+Office to you or me?  Actually nothing, as far as our selfish and
+personal interests go.  And who is not selfish, who is not personal in
+his attitude toward his community and his country?  I frankly admit
+that I am.  I suspect that you are.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, twenty miles north of this old and highly
+civilized city, lies a tract fifty miles square of primitive forest,
+inhabited by savages.  That tract of land is as beautiful as a dream of
+heaven.  Virgin pines tower to the heavens.  Little lakes lie hid like
+jewels on its bosoms.  Its soil is black.  Fur bearing animals frequent
+it now as they did a century ago.
+
+"Friends, in this city of white men there is want and suffering for the
+necessities of life.  Twenty miles to the north lies plenty for every
+needy inhabitant of the town, lies a bit of loam and heaven-kissing
+pines for each and all.
+
+"But, you say, they belong to the Indians!  Friends, they belong to a
+filthy, degenerate, lazy race of savages, who refuse to till the fields
+or cut the pines, who spend on whiskey the money allowed them by a
+benevolent government and live for the rest, like beasts of the field.
+
+"Why, I ask you, should Indians be pampered and protected, while whites
+live only in the bitter air of competition?
+
+"I am not mincing words to-night.  I do not talk of taking the lands
+from the Indians by crooked methods.  You all know the law.  An Indian
+may not sell the lands allotted to him.  I want you to send me to
+Congress to change that law.  I want the Indian to be able to sell his
+acreage."
+
+Levine stopped and bowed.  Pandemonium broke loose in the Square.
+Clapping, hisses, cheers and cat-calls.  Lydia clung to her father's
+arm while he began to struggle through the crowd.
+
+"Well," he said, as they reached the outer edge of the Square and
+headed for the trolley, "the battle is on."
+
+"But what will the Indians do, Daddy, if they sell their land?" asked
+Lydia.
+
+"Do!  Why just what John intimated.  Get out and hustle for a living
+like the rest of us do.  Why not?"
+
+Why not indeed!  "What did some of the people hiss for?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Oh, there's a cheap bunch of sentimentalists in the town,--all of 'em,
+you'll notice, with good incomes,--who claim the Indians are like
+children, so we should take care of 'em like children.  Then there's
+another bunch who make a fat living looting the Indians.  They don't
+want the reservation broken up.  I'm going to sit on the back seat of
+the car and smoke."
+
+Lydia clambered into the seat beside her father.  "Well--but--well, I
+suppose if Mr. Levine feels that way and you too, it's right.  But they
+are kind of like children.  Charlie Jackson's awful smart, but he's
+like a child too."
+
+"I don't care what they're like," said Amos.  "We've babied 'em long
+enough.  Let 'em get out and hustle."
+
+"Do you think Mr. Levine'll get elected?"
+
+Amos shrugged his shoulders.  "Never can tell.  This is a Democratic
+town, but Levine is standing for something both Democrats and
+Republicans want.  It'll be a pretty fight.  May split the Democratic
+party."
+
+This was the beginning of Lydia's reading of the newspapers.  To her
+father's secret amusement, she found the main details of Levine's
+battle as interesting as a novel.  Every evening when he got home to
+supper he found her poring over the two local papers and primed with
+questions for him.  Up to this moment she had lived in a quiet world
+bounded by her school, the home, the bit of lake shore and wood with
+which she was intimate, and peopled by her father and her few friends.
+
+With John Levine's speech, her horizon suddenly expanded to take in the
+city and the vague picture of the reservation to the north.  She
+realized that the eyes of the whole community were focused on her
+dearest friend.  Up on the quiet, shaded college campus--the newspapers
+told her--they spoke of him contemptuously.  He was a cheap politician,
+full of unsound economic principles, with a history of dishonest land
+deals behind him.  It would be a shame to the community to be
+represented by such a man.  They said that his Democratic opponent, a
+lawyer who had been in Congress some five terms, was at least a
+gentleman whose career had been a clean and open book.
+
+When these slurs reached Levine, he answered in a vitriolic speech in
+which he named the names of several members of the faculty who had
+profited through the Indian agent in quiet little sales of worthless
+goods to Indians.
+
+The saloon element, Lydia learned, was against Levine.  It wanted the
+reservation to stand.  That the saloon element should be in harmony
+with them was galling to the college crowd, though the fact that their
+motives for agreement were utterly different was some solace.
+
+The "fast crowd" were for John.  Clubmen, politicians, real estate men
+were high in his praise.  The farmers all were going to vote for him.
+
+Lake City was always interested in the national election but this year,
+where the presidential candidates were mentioned once, Levine and his
+opponent were mentioned a hundred times.  Ministers preached sermons on
+the campaign.  The Ladies' Aid Society of the Methodist Church, the
+Needlework Guild of the Episcopalian, the Woman's Auxiliary of the
+Unitarian, hereditary enemies, combined forces to work for Levine, and
+the freeing of the poor Indian from bondage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE NOTE
+
+
+"Each year I strew the ground with cones, yet no young pines grow up.
+This has been true only since the Indians went."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Margery Marshall had entered High School this fall.  She had returned
+from New York with a trousseau that a bride might have envied.  She was
+growing tall, and her beauty already was remarkable.  Her little head
+carried its great black braid proudly.  The pallor of her skin was
+perfectly healthy--and even the Senior lads were seen to observe her
+with interest and appreciation.
+
+The results of Lydia's summer dressmaking had not been bad.  She had
+made herself several creditable shirtwaists and a neat little blue
+serge skirt.  Her shoes were still shabby.  Poor Lydia seemed somehow
+never to have decent shoes.  But her hands and the back of her neck
+were clean; and her pile of Junior school books already had been paid
+for--by picking small fruit for Ma Norton during the summer and helping
+her to can it.  She came back to school with zeal and less than her
+usual sense of shabbiness.
+
+It was a day toward the first of October at the noon hour that Lydia
+met Kent and Charlie Jackson.  She had finished her lunch, which she
+ate in the cloakroom, and bareheaded and coatless was walking up and
+down the sidewalk before the schoolhouse.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!  How's everything?" asked Kent.  "I haven't seen you to
+talk to since last spring."
+
+"Did you have a fine summer?" said Lydia.
+
+"Aw, only part of it.  Dad made me work till the middle of August, then
+Charlie and I camped up on the reservation."
+
+"Shame he had to work, isn't it?" grinned Charlie.  "Poor little Kent!"
+
+The three laughed, for Kent now towered above Lydia a half head and was
+as brawny as Charlie.
+
+"There comes Margery," said Lydia.  "She hardly speaks to me now, she's
+been to New York."
+
+"She _is_ a peach," exclaimed Charlie, eying Margery in her natty
+little blue suit appraisingly.
+
+"Some swell dame, huh?" commented Kent, his hands in his trousers'
+pockets, cap on the back of his head.  "Hello, Marg!  Whither and why?"
+
+"Oh, how de do, Kent!"  Margery approached languidly, including Lydia
+and Charlie in her nod.
+
+"Got any paper dolls in your pocket, Miss Marshall?" inquired Charlie.
+
+Margery tossed her head.  "Oh, I gave up that sort of thing long ago!"
+
+"Land sakes!"  The young Indian chuckled.
+
+"How do you like High School, Margery?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Oh, it's well enough for a year or so!  Of course Mama, I
+mean--Mother's going to send me to New York to finish."
+
+"'Mother!' suffering cats!" moaned Kent.  "Marg, you're getting so
+refined, I almost regret having pulled you out of the lake that time."
+
+"_You_!  Why Kent Marshall, I pulled her out myself!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"And I saved both of you--and got licked for it," said Kent.
+
+"I hope you all had a pleasant summer," observed Margery, twisting up
+the curls in front of her small ears.  "Mother and I were in New York."
+
+Kent, Lydia and Charlie exchanged glances.
+
+"I had a pretty good summer," said Lydia.  "I sewed and cooked and
+scrubbed and swam and once Adam, Dad, Mr. Levine and I walked clear
+round the lake, eighteen miles.  Adam nearly died, he's so fat and
+bow-legged.  He scolded all the way."
+
+"I don't see how your father can let that Mr. Levine come to your
+house!" exclaimed Margery with sudden energy.  "My father says he's a
+dangerous man."
+
+"He's a crook!" said Charlie, stolidly and finally.
+
+Lydia stamped her foot.  "He's not and he's my friend!" she cried.
+
+"You'd better not admit it!"  Margery's voice was scornful.  "Daddy
+says he's going to speak to your father about him."
+
+"Your father'd better not go up against Levine too hard," said Kent,
+with a superior masculine air.  "Just tell him I said so."
+
+"You don't stick up for Levine, do you, Kent?" asked Charlie,
+indignantly.
+
+"Why, no, but Dave Marshall's got no business to put his nose in the
+air over John Levine.  I don't care if he is Margery's father.
+Everybody in town knows that he's as cruel as a wolf about mortgages
+and some of his money deals won't bear daylight."
+
+"Don't you dare to say such things about my father," shrieked Margery.
+
+"He was awful good to Dad and me about a money matter," protested Lydia.
+
+"Aw, all of us men are good to you, Lyd," said Kent impatiently.
+"You're that kind.  Being good to you don't make a man a saint.  Look
+at Levine.  He's got a lot of followers, but I'll bet you're the only
+person he's fond of."
+
+"He's a crook," repeated Charlie, slowly.  "If what he's trying to do
+goes through, my tribe'll be wanderers on the face of the earth.  If I
+thought it would do any good, I'd kill him.  But some other brute of a
+white would take his place.  It's hopeless."
+
+The three young whites looked at the Indian wonderingly.  Their little
+spatting was as nothing, they realized, to the mature and tragic
+bitterness that Charlie expressed.  A vague sense of a catastrophe,
+epic in character, that the Indian evidently saw clearly, but was
+beyond their comprehension, silenced them.  The awkward pause was
+broken by the school bell.
+
+Lydia had plenty to think of on her long walk home.  Charlie's voice
+and words haunted her.  What did it all mean?  Why was he so resentful
+and so hopeless?  She made up her mind that when she had the
+opportunity to ask him, she would.  She sighed a little, as she thought
+of the comments of her mates on John Levine.  Little by little she was
+realizing that she was the only person in the world that saw the
+gentle, tender side of the Republican candidate for Congress.  The
+realization thrilled her, while it worried her.  She had an idea that
+she ought to make him show the world the heart he showed to her.  As
+she turned in at the gate and received Adam's greetings, she resolved
+to talk this matter over with Levine.
+
+The opportunity to talk with Charlie came about simply enough.  At
+recess one day a week or so later he asked her if she was going to the
+first Senior Hop of the year.  Lydia gave him a clear look.
+
+"Why do you ask me that?  Just to embarrass me?" she said.
+
+Charlie looked startled.  "Lord knows I didn't mean anything," he
+exclaimed.  "What're you so touchy about?"
+
+Lydia's cheeks burned redder than usual.  "I went to a party at Miss
+Towne's when I was a Freshman and I promised myself I'd never go to
+another."
+
+"Why not!"  Charlie's astonishment was genuine.
+
+"Clothes," replied Lydia, briefly.
+
+The Indian boy leaned against a desk and looked Lydia over through
+half-closed eyes.  "You're an awful pretty girl, Lydia.  Honest you
+are, and you've got more brain in a minute than any other girl in
+school'll have all her life."
+
+Lydia blushed furiously.  Then moved by Charlie's simplicity and
+obviously sincere liking, she came closer to him and said, "Then,
+Charlie, why hasn't any boy ever asked me to a party?  Is it just
+clothes?"
+
+Looking up at him with girlish wistfulness in the blue depths of her
+eyes, with the something tragic in the lines of her face that little
+Patience's death had written there irradicably, with poverty speaking
+from every fold of the blouse and skirt, yet with all the indescribable
+charm of girlish beauty at fifteen, Lydia was more appealing than
+Charlie could stand.
+
+"Lydia, I'll take you to a party a week, if you'll go!" he cried.
+
+"No!  No!  I couldn't go," she protested.  "Answer my question--is it
+clothes?"
+
+"No, only half clothes," answered Charlie, meeting her honestly.  "The
+other half is you know too much.  You know the fellows like a girl that
+giggles a lot and don't know as much as he does and that's a peachy
+dancer and that'll let him hold her hand and kiss her.  And that's the
+honest to God truth, Lydia."
+
+"Oh," she said.  "Oh--"  Then, "Well, I could giggle, all right.  I
+can't dance very well because I've just picked up the steps from
+watching the girls teach each other in the cloakroom.  Oh, well, I
+don't care!  I've got Adam and I've got Mr. Levine."
+
+"He's a nice one to have," sneered Charlie.
+
+"Why do you hate him so, Charlie?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Lots of reasons.  And I'll hate him more if he gets his bill through
+Congress."
+
+"I don't see why you feel so," said Lydia.  "You get along all right
+without the reservation, why shouldn't the other Indians.  I don't
+understand."
+
+"No, you don't understand," replied Charlie, "you're like most of the
+other whites round here.  You see a chance to get land and you'd
+crucify each other if you needed to, to get it.  What chance do Indians
+stand?  But I tell you this," his voice sank to a hoarse whisper and
+his eyes looked far beyond her, "if there is a God of the Indians as
+well as the whites, you'll pay some day!  You'll pay as we are paying."
+
+Lydia shivered.  "Don't talk so, Charlie.  I wish I knew all about it,
+the truth about it.  If I was a man, you bet before I voted, I'd find
+out.  I'd go up there on that reservation and I'd see for myself
+whether it would be better for the Indians to get off.  That poor old
+squaw I gave my lunch to, I wonder what would become of her--"
+
+"Look here, Lydia," exclaimed Charlie, "why don't you come up on the
+reservation for a camping trip, next summer, for a week or so?"
+
+"Costs too much," said Lydia.
+
+"Wouldn't either.  I can get tents and it wouldn't cost you anything
+but your share of the food.  Kent'll go and maybe one of the teachers
+would chaperone."
+
+Lydia's eyes kindled.  "Gee, Charlie, perhaps it could be fixed!  I got
+nine months to earn the money in.  It's something to look forward to."
+
+Charlie nodded and moved away.  "You'll learn things up there you never
+dreamed of," he said.
+
+The conversation with John Levine did not take place until the Sunday
+before the election.  The fight in the Congressional district had
+increased in bitterness as it went on.  Nothing but greed could have
+precipitated so malevolent a war.  The town was utterly disrupted.
+Neighbors of years' standing quarreled on sight.  Students in the
+University refused to enter the classrooms of teachers who disagreed
+with them on the Levine fight.  Family feuds developed.  Ancient family
+skeletons regarding pine grafts and Indian looting saw the light of day.
+
+On the Saturday a week before election, Lydia went to pay her duty call
+on Margery.  Elviry admitted her.  It was the first time Lydia had seen
+her since the New York trip.
+
+"Margery'll be right down," said Elviry.  "She's just finished her nap."
+
+"Her what?" inquired Lydia, politely.
+
+"Her nap.  A New York beauty doctor told me to have her take one every
+day.  Of course, going to school, she can't do it only Saturdays and
+Sundays.  She went to the Hop last night.  She looked lovely in a cream
+chiffon.  One of the college professors asked who was that little
+beauty.  Come in, Margery."
+
+Margery strolled into the room in a bright red kimona.  "How de do,
+Lydia," she said.
+
+"Hello, Margery.  Want to play paper dolls?"
+
+"Paper dolls!" shrieked Elviry.  "Why, Margery, you are fifteen!"
+
+"I don't care," replied Lydia obstinately.  "I still play 'em once in a
+while."
+
+"I haven't touched one since last spring," said Margery.  "Want to see
+my New York clothes?"
+
+"No, thank you," answered Lydia.  "I'd just as soon not.  I've got to
+get home right away."
+
+"What's in that big bundle?" asked Elviry, pointing to the huge paper
+parcel in Lydia's lap.
+
+"Nothing," she said shortly, looking at the rope portieres in the
+doorway.
+
+"I got new ones in the East," said Elviry, following her glance.
+"Shells strung together.  But I put 'em up only when we have parties.
+We don't use anything but doilies on the dining table now, no
+tablecloths.  It's the latest thing in New York.  Who made your
+shirtwaist, Lydia?"
+
+"I did," answered Lydia, not without pride.
+
+"I thought so," commented Elviry.  "How much was the goods a yard--six
+cents?  I thought so.  Hum--Margery's every day shirtwaists were none
+of them less than thirty-nine cents a yard, in New York.  But of course
+that's beyond you.  I don't suppose your father's had a raise, yet.  He
+ain't that kind.  Does he pay Levine any rent for that cottage?"
+
+"Of course, every month!" exclaimed Lydia, indignantly.
+
+"Oh!  I just asked!  Your father's been talking strong for him at the
+plow factory, they say, and we just wondered.  He's old enough to be
+your father, but you're getting to be a young lady now, Lydia, and it's
+very bad for your reputation to be seen with him.  You haven't any
+mother and I must speak."
+
+"I don't see how John Levine's reputation about Indians or pine lands
+can hurt me any," protested Lydia, angrily, "and I just think you're
+the impolitest person I know."
+
+Elviry snorted and started to speak but Margery interrupted.
+
+"You are impolite, Mama!  It's none of our business about Lydia--if she
+wants to be common."
+
+Lydia rose, holding the paper parcel carefully in her arms.  "I _am_
+common, just common folks!  I always was and I always will be and I'm
+glad of it--and I'm going home."
+
+The front door slammed as she spoke and Dave Marshall came in.
+
+"Hello!  Well, Lydia, this is a sight for sore eyes.  Thought you'd
+forgotten us.  What's in your bundle?"
+
+Lydia spoke furiously, tearing the paper off the bundle as she did so.
+
+"Well, since you're all so curious, I'll show you!"  And Florence
+Dombey, with the hectic gaze unchanged, emerged.  "There!" said Lydia.
+"I never shall be too old for Florence Dombey and I thought Margery
+wouldn't be either--but I was wrong.  I wrapped Florence Dombey up
+because I do look too big for dolls and I don't want folks to laugh at
+her."
+
+"Of course you're not too big for dolls," said Dave.  "You and Margery
+go on and have your play."
+
+"Daddy!" cried Margery.  "Why, I wouldn't touch a doll now."
+
+"There, you see!" said Lydia, laying Florence Dombey on a chair while
+she pulled on her coat--made this year from one that Lizzie had grown
+too stout to wear--"It's no use for me to try to be friends any more
+with Margery.  She's rich and I'm common and poor.  She has parties and
+beaux and clothes and I don't.  I'll be friends with you but I can't be
+friends with her."
+
+Dave looked from his two women folks to Lydia.  "What've you two been
+saying now?" he asked gruffly.
+
+Elviry tossed her head.  "Nothing at all.  I just showed a decent
+interest in Lydia, as I would in any motherless girl and she got mad."
+
+"Yes, I know your decent interest," grunted Dave.  "You make me sick,
+Elviry.  Why I was ever such a fool as to let you spend a summer in New
+York, I don't know."
+
+"Now, Dave," said Elviry in a conciliating tone, "you said that Lydia
+and Amos ought to be warned about Levine."
+
+"Yes, I did," exclaimed Dave, with a sudden change of voice.  "You tell
+your father to come round and see me this evening, Lydia.  I don't like
+his attitude on the reservation question.  Tell him if I can't change
+his views any other way, I may have to bring pressure with that note."
+
+Lydia blanched.  She looked at Marshall with parted lips.  She never
+had heard before the peculiar, metallic quality in his voice that she
+heard now.  She buttoned her coat with trembling fingers.
+
+"Yes, sir, I'll tell him," she said.  "I guess it's no use to try to be
+friends with you either.  We'll pay that note up, somehow.  Even it
+can't be allowed to keep us from believing what we believe."  Her voice
+strengthened suddenly.  "What's the use of being an American if you
+can't believe what you want to?  We'll pay that note!  If I have to
+quit school and go out as a hired girl, we will."
+
+Dave Marshall looked from Lydia to Margery and back again.  Margery was
+patting her curls.  Lydia, holding the doll, returned his look
+indignantly.
+
+"I'm not going to tell my father to come to see you.  I'll answer right
+now.  We'll think and say what we please and you can do whatever you
+want to about that nasty old note."
+
+Dave suddenly laughed.  "There, Elviry, that's what I mean about
+Lydia's being the real thing.  You can't help my being your friend,
+Lydia, no matter what happens.  But," grimly, "I'll call in that note
+unless your father shuts up."
+
+"Good-by!" exclaimed Lydia abruptly and she marched into the hall, head
+held high, and closed the outside door firmly behind her.
+
+It had been a long time since she had known the heavy sinking of the
+heart that she felt now.  In spite of their desperate poverty, since
+her interview in the bank with Marshall four years before, she had not
+worried about money matters.  She had an utter horror of repeating
+Marshall's message to her father.  Money worry made Amos frantic.  She
+plodded along the October road, unheeding the frosty sunshine or the
+scudding brown leaves that had charmed her on her earlier trip.
+
+In the midst of one of her longest sighs, Billy Norton overtook her.
+
+"Well, Lydia," he said, "isn't it chilly for your lady friend?"
+
+"Hello, Billy," said Lydia, looking up at the young man soberly.  Billy
+was a sophomore in college.
+
+"I'll carry her, if your hands are cold, though I'd hate to be caught
+at it," he said.
+
+Lydia ignored his offer.  "Billy, is there any way a girl like me could
+earn $600?" she asked him.
+
+"Golly, not that I know of!  Why?"
+
+"Oh, I just asked.  I wish I was a man."
+
+Billy looked at the scarlet cheeks and the blowing yellow curls.  "I
+don't," he said.  "What's worrying you, Lyd?"
+
+"Nothing," she insisted.  Then, anxious to change the subject, she
+asked, "What're you studying to be, Billy?"
+
+"A farmer.  Next year I shift into the long agric. course."
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia, "I don't see what you want to study to be
+a farmer for.  I should think you'd want to be something classy like a
+lawyer or--or something."
+
+"Lots of folks think the same way, but I believe a farmer's the most
+independent man in the world.  And that's what I want to be,
+independent--call no man boss."
+
+"That's me too, Billy," cried Lydia, pausing at her gate.  "That's what
+I want to be, independent.  That's what real Americans are."
+
+"You're a funny little girl," said Billy.  "What made you think of
+that?"
+
+"I often think about it," returned Lydia, running up the path to the
+door.
+
+Billy stood for a minute looking after her thoughtfully.  Then he
+smiled to himself and went on homeward.
+
+Lydia did not tell her father that night of Marshall's threat.  He was
+in such a tranquil mood that she could not bear to upset him.  But the
+next day she gathered her courage together and told him.  Amos was
+speechless for a moment.  Then to her surprise instead of walking the
+floor and swearing, he gave a long whistle.
+
+"So it's that serious, is it?  I wonder just what he's up to!  The old
+crook!  Huh!  This will be nuts for John though.  If he doesn't come
+out this afternoon, I'll go look him up this evening."
+
+Lydia's jaw dropped.  "But, Daddy, you don't seem to realize we'll have
+to pay $600 the first of January," she urged, her voice still
+trembling.  She had scarcely slept the night before in dread of this
+moment.
+
+For the first time, Amos looked at her carefully.  "Why, my dear child,
+there's nothing to worry about!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You mean you're going to stop talking for Mr. Levine?  Oh, Daddy,
+don't do that!  We can borrow the money somewhere and I'll help pay it
+back.  I'm almost grown up now."
+
+"'Stop talking'!" roared Amos.  "I've fallen pretty far below what my
+ancestors stood for, but I ain't that low yet.  Now," his voice
+softened, "you stop worrying.  Levine and I'll take care of this."
+
+Lydia looked at her father doubtfully and suddenly he laughed
+unsteadily and kissed her.  "You get more and more like your mother.
+I've seen that look on her face a hundred times when I told her I'd fix
+up a money matter.  I don't know what I'd do without you, Lydia, I
+swan."
+
+This was rare demonstrativeness for Amos.  The reaction from anxiety
+was almost too much for Lydia.  She laughed a little wildly, and
+seizing Adam by his fore paws put him through a two step that was agony
+for the heavy fellow.  Then she put on her coat, and bareheaded started
+for a walk.  Amos stood in the window staring after the bright hair in
+the October sun until it disappeared into the woods.  Then he sighed
+softly.  "Oh, Patience, Patience, I wonder if you can see her now!"
+
+Levine stole away from his various councils and reached the cottage
+about supper time.
+
+"If I didn't get out here once in a while," he said as he sat down to
+the waffles and coffee that made the Sunday night treat Lydia had
+lately developed, "I'd get to believe every one was playing politics."
+
+Lizzie, pouring the coffee, looked Levine over.  "A bullet'd have hard
+work to hit you now," she remarked, "you're so thin.  If you'd listen
+to me, you'd be taking Cod Liver Oil."
+
+Levine smiled at the wrinkled old face opposite.  "If I didn't listen
+to you, I don't know who I would.  Aren't you and Lydia all the women
+folks I got?  If you'll fix me up some dope, I'll take a dose every
+time I come out here."
+
+Lizzie sniffed and loaded his plate with another waffle.  Amos was
+giving no heed to these small amenities.  He was eating his waffles
+absentmindedly and suddenly burst forth,
+
+"Lydia, tell John about Dave Marshall."
+
+Lydia, flushing uncomfortably, did so.  Levine did not cease his
+onslaught on the waffles during the recital.  When she had finished, he
+passed his coffee cup.
+
+"Another cup, young Lydia.  Your coffee is something to dream of."
+
+Lydia was too surprised to take the cup.  "But--but _six hundred
+dollars_.  Mr. Levine!" she gasped.
+
+"Good news, eh, Amos?" said Levine.  "Getting anxious, isn't he!"  Then
+catching Lydia's look of consternation, "Why, bless your soul, Lydia,
+what are you upset about?  Let him call in the loan.  I can pay it."
+
+Amos nodded.  "Just what I said."
+
+"But I think that's awful," protested Lydia.  "We owe Mr. Levine so
+much now."
+
+The effect of her words on John was astonishing.  He half rose from his
+chair and said in a tone not to be forgotten, "Lydia, never let me hear
+you speak again of owing me anything!  Between you and me there can
+never be any sense of obligation.  Do you understand me?"
+
+There was a moment's silence at the table, Amos and Lizzie glanced at
+each other, but Lydia's clear gaze was on the deep eyes of Levine.
+What she saw there she was too young to understand, but she answered
+gravely,
+
+"All right, Mr. Levine."
+
+John sank back in his chair and passed his plate for a waffle.
+
+"I'll make my interest and payments to you then, thank the Lord!" said
+Amos.
+
+"We'll make them on time just as usual," remarked Lydia, in a voice
+that had both reproof and warning in it.  "Ain't debts perfectly
+awful," she sighed.
+
+"So Marshall's worried," repeated John, complacently, when they were
+gathered round the stove.  "Well, it behooves him to be.  I don't know
+what he'll do when the Indians are gone."
+
+"Mr. Levine," asked Lydia, "where'll the Indians go?"
+
+John shrugged his shoulders.  "Go to the devil, most of them."
+
+"Oh, but that seems terrible!" cried Lydia.
+
+"No more terrible than the way they live and die on the reservation.
+My dear child, don't develop any sentiment for the Indian.  He's as
+doomed as the buffalo.  It's fate or life or evolution working
+out--whatever your fancy names it.  No sickly gush will stop it.  As
+long as the Indian has a pine or a pelt, we'll exploit him.  When he
+has none, we'll kick him out, like the dead dog he is."
+
+Lydia, her eyes round, her lips parted, did not reply.  For a moment
+she saw the Levine that the world saw, cold, logical, merciless.  John
+interpreted her expression instantly and smiled.  "Don't look at me so,
+young Lydia.  I'm just being honest.  The rest talk about 'freeing the
+Indian.'  I say damn the Indian, enrich the whites."
+
+"It--it makes me feel sort of sick at my stomach," replied Lydia,
+slowly.  "I suppose you're right, but I can't help feeling sorry for
+Charlie Jackson and my old squaw."
+
+Levine nodded understandingly and turned to Amos.  "What's the talk in
+the factory?" he asked.
+
+During the half hour that followed, Lydia did not speak again nor did
+she hear any of the conversation.  New voices were beginning to whisper
+to her.  Try as she would to hush them with her faith in her father and
+John, they continued to query: How about the Indians?  Whose is the
+land?  What do you yourself believe?
+
+When Levine rose at nine to leave, she followed him to the door.  "Adam
+and I'll walk a way with you," she said, "while Dad puts his chickens
+to bed."
+
+"Fine!" exclaimed John.  "My wheel is out of commission so I have to
+walk to the trolley."
+
+He glanced at Lydia a trifle curiously however.  This was a new venture
+on her part.  It was a clear, cold, starlit night.  Lydia trudged along
+for a few moments in silence.  Then Levine pulled her hand through his
+arm.
+
+"Out with it, young Lydia," he said.
+
+"Do you suppose," she asked, "that God is something like ether--or like
+electricity--in the air, everywhere, something that sort of holds us
+together, you know?"
+
+"Well," replied John, slowly, "I wouldn't want to believe that.  I want
+to find a God we can know and understand.  A God that's tender and--and
+human, by Jove."
+
+Lydia looked up at him quickly in the starlight.  "After what you said
+about Indians to-night, you can't believe God could be tender and--and
+let that happen!"
+
+Levine returned her look and smiled.  "You score there, honey.  Lydia,
+you're growing up.  Your head's above my shoulder now."
+
+The young girl nodded carelessly.  "But I wanted to talk to you about
+taking the reservation, not about me."
+
+"I guess we'd better do that another time.  I don't dare to have you
+walk further with me.  This is a lonesome road back for you.  And
+besides, I don't want you to scold me."
+
+"Scold you!" Lydia paused in her astonishment.  "Why, I love you as
+much as I do anybody in the world.  How could I scold you?"
+
+Levine looked down into the shadowy, childish eyes.  "Couldn't you?
+Well, you're a dear, anyhow.  Now scoot and I'll watch till you reach
+the gate."
+
+Lydia hesitated.  She felt a change in John's manner and wondered if
+she had hurt his feelings.  "Kiss me good night, then," she said.  "You
+don't do it as regularly as you used to.  If I don't watch you, you'll
+be finding some one else to travel with you."
+
+John turned the little face up and kissed her gently on the forehead,
+but Lydia with rare demonstrativeness threw her arms about his neck and
+kissed his lips with a full childish smack.
+
+"There!" she said complacently.  "Come on, Adam!  Don't wait, Mr.
+Levine.  I'm safe with Adam."
+
+But John Levine did wait, standing with his hand against his lips, his
+head bowed, till he heard the gate click.  Then he lifted his face to
+the stars.  "God," he whispered, "why do You make me forty-five instead
+of twenty-five?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE ELECTION
+
+
+"Perhaps, after all, I have fulfilled my destiny in being a lute for
+the wind.  But then why the cones and the broken boughs?"--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+It rained on Election Day, a cold November drizzle that elated the
+Democrats.  "A rainy day always brings a Democratic victory," said
+Amos, gloomily, voicing the general superstition.
+
+The day was a legal holiday and even the saloons were closed.  Yet Lake
+City was full of drunken men by noon.  Every hack, surrey and hotel bus
+in town was busy in the pay of one faction or the other hauling voters
+to the booths.  The Capitol square was deserted but groups of men, some
+of them very drunk and some of them very sober, were to be found
+throughout the business section of the city, bitterly debating the
+reservation question.
+
+There were a great number of Indians in town that day, big dark fellows
+in muddy moccasins and faded mackinaws who stood about watching the
+machinations of the whites without audible comments.
+
+Toward night the rain stopped and Lydia begged her father to take her
+into town to see the parade that would be indulged in by the victorious
+party.  Amos was not at all averse to taking in the parade, himself.
+So nine o'clock found the two at the Square with a great waiting crowd.
+There were very few women in the crowd.  Those that Lydia saw were
+painted and loud-voiced.  Amos told her vaguely that they were
+"hussies" and that she was not to let go of his arm for an instant.
+
+Lydia didn't know what a hussy was, but she didn't want to stir an inch
+from her father's side because of her fear of drunken men.  She was in
+a quiver of excitement; torn with pity and doubt when she thought of
+Charlie Jackson; speechless with apprehension when she thought of the
+possibility of Levine's being defeated.
+
+It was close on ten o'clock when the sound of a drum was heard from the
+direction of the Methodist Church.  The crowd started toward the sound,
+then paused as Binny Bates, the barber, in a stove-pipe hat, mounted on
+a much excited horse, rode up the street.  Binny was a Levine man and
+the crowd broke into cheers and cat-calls.
+
+After Binny came the band, playing for dear life "Hail the Conquering
+Hero" and after the band, two and two a great line of citizens with
+kerosene torches.  After the torches came the transparencies: "Levine
+Wins!"  "The Reservation is Ours."  "Back to the land, boys!"  "We've
+dropped the white men's burden."
+
+And following the transparencies came a surprise for crowd and paraders
+alike.  Close on the heels of the last white man strode Charlie
+Jackson, with a sign, "The land is ours!  You have robbed us!" and
+after Charlie, perhaps a hundred Indians, tramping silently two by two,
+to the faint strain of the band ahead,
+
+  "Columbia, the gem of the ocean
+  The home of the brave and the free--"
+
+For a moment, the crowd was surprised into silence.  Then a handful of
+mud caught Charlie's sign and a group of college students, with a shout
+of "Break up the line!  Break up the line," broke into the ranks of the
+Indians and in a moment a free for all fight was on.
+
+Amos rushed Lydia down a side street and upon a street car.  "Well!
+Well!  Well!" he kept chuckling.  "John ate 'em alive!  Well!  Well!"
+Then in the light of the car he looked at Lydia.  "For heaven's sake!
+What are you crying for, child?"
+
+"I don't know," faltered Lydia.  "I'm--glad for Mr. Levine--but poor
+Charlie Jackson!  You don't suppose they'll hurt him?"
+
+"Oh, pshaw," replied Amos.  "Nothing but an election night fight!  The
+young Indian went into the parade just to start one."
+
+"How soon will the Indians have to get off the reservation?" asked
+Lydia.
+
+"Oh, in a year or so!  John's got to get a bill through Congress, you
+know."
+
+"Oh."  Lydia gave a great sigh of relief; a year or so was a very long
+time.  She decided to forget the Indians' trouble and rejoice in
+Levine's triumph.
+
+It was a triumph that John himself took very quietly.  He realized that
+he had ahead of him in Congress a long and heavy campaign.  The forces
+against him were not going to lie down, defeated by his election.  But
+after the fashion of American elections, there were no protests or
+quarrels afterward.  The town settled immediately to its old routine
+and Levine was dropped from the front pages of the newspapers.
+
+Charlie Jackson was taciturn for a week or so, then he played
+brilliantly in the Thanksgiving football game and at the banquet which
+followed he was his old genial self.
+
+After Christmas Lydia began seriously to consider how she could earn
+the twenty-five dollars that her share in the camping trip would cost.
+Lizzie was aghast at the size of the sum and didn't approve of the idea
+of camping anyhow.  Amos gave his consent to her going, feeling that it
+was quite safe; that Lydia never could earn the money.
+
+Lydia was dampened but not daunted.  One (in January) Saturday
+afternoon, she went to call on Ma Norton.  Ma was sitting in her bright
+kitchen sewing carpet rags.  Ma's hair was beginning to turn gray but
+her plump cheeks were red and her gray eyes behind her spectacles were
+as clear as a girl's.
+
+"Who's going to chaperone you children?" she asked Lydia.
+
+"Miss Towne.  The rest kicked, but I like her."
+
+"You use a good deal of unnecessary slang, my dear," said Ma.  "Who of
+the boys and girls are going?"
+
+"Charlie and Kent and Olga and I.  Margery's crazy to go, only her
+mother hasn't given in yet.  If she does go, we'll ask Gustus Bach too."
+
+Ma Norton looked at Lydia searchingly.  "I didn't know you had anything
+to do with Olga or with Margery either, now."
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia, "this is Charlie's, party!  None of 'em
+would go on my invitation.  I--I don't quite see why, but I don't have
+chums like the rest."
+
+"I wouldn't let it worry me," said Ma.  "You've never had time to
+lally-gag.  That's the secret of it."
+
+Lydia turned this over in her mind thoughtfully for a moment and the
+older woman, looking up from her sewing caught on the young face the
+look of sadness that should not have been there.
+
+"It would be nice for you to have the camping trip, dear," said Ma.
+"You've had so little to do with children your own age.  I suppose
+you're worrying over the money end?"
+
+Lydia nodded.  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about.  Every
+spring you get some one in to help you clean house.  If you'll do it in
+Easter vacation, this year, and let me help, why, that would be a
+couple of dollars, wouldn't it?"
+
+Ma Norton looked at the slender little figure and thought of the heavy
+carpet beating, the shoving of furniture, the cleaning of mattresses
+that the stout old colored man hustled through for her every spring.
+And she thought of the winter's butter and egg money (nearly forty
+dollars it amounted to already) that she was saving for new parlor
+curtains.  Then she recalled the little figure that had nightly trudged
+two miles delivering milk rather than take Billy's school books as a
+gift.  And Ma Norton smiled a little ruefully as she said,
+
+"All right, you can help me instead of old Job and I'll pay you five
+dollars."
+
+"Five dollars for what?" asked Billy.  He had come in the side door,
+unheeded.
+
+His mother explained the situation.  Billy listened attentively,
+warming his hands at the stove.
+
+"If I didn't have so much to do at home," said Lydia, "I could work
+here Saturdays and Sundays and earn a little, that way."
+
+"Well, you wouldn't, you know," growled Billy.  Lydia and Ma Norton
+looked up, startled at his tone.
+
+"For the land's sake, Billy, why not?" exclaimed Ma.
+
+"Because, Lydia's getting too big now to do these hired girl stunts.
+It was bad enough when she was little.  But folks'll never forget 'em
+and always think of her as a hired girl if she keeps on."
+
+Lydia gasped and turned scarlet.  Ma Norton stared at her son as if she
+never had seen him before.  Strong and blonde and six feet tall, he
+seemed suddenly to his mother no longer a boy but a mature man, and a
+very handsome one at that.  As a matter of fact, although Billy's gaunt
+frame was filling out and his irregular features were maturing into
+lines of rugged strength, he never would be handsome.  He was looking
+at Lydia now with the curious expression of understanding that she
+always brought to his gray eyes.
+
+"I'm not ashamed to be a hired girl for your mother, Billy Norton,"
+snapped Lydia.
+
+"Well, I'm ashamed for you," answered the young man.  "You earn your
+money some other way."
+
+Lydia looked meaningly at Billy's big hands, rough and red with milking
+and farm work.
+
+"You do hired man's work for your father.  How'll you live that down?"
+
+It was Billy's turn to blush.  "I'm a man," he replied.
+
+Lydia's voice suddenly quivered.  "Then how can I earn money?"
+
+"Dead easy!  You make the best fudge in the world.  Put some for sale
+in the University book store.  I'm clerking there an hour every day."
+
+"The very thing!" cried Ma Norton.
+
+"Billy, you are a duck!" shrieked Lydia.
+
+"Gimme something to eat, Ma, before I go out to milk," said Billy, with
+a grin that struggled to be modest.
+
+Billy's suggestion proved indeed to be a happy one.  He was a willing
+pack horse and middleman for Lydia and though the demand for fudge was
+never overwhelming, Lydia by the end of May had cleared something over
+thirty-five dollars.
+
+Her joy over this method of earning money was not confined to its
+relation to her camping trip.  She saw herself helping to pay up their
+indebtedness to Levine, Marshall having made good his threat to call in
+the note.  She saw herself gradually developing an enormous trade that
+finally should demand a whole store for itself.  The store would
+develop into a candy factory.  The candy factory would grow into a
+business that would send Lydia, admired and famous, traveling about the
+world in a private yacht.
+
+In the meantime, she expended the whole of four dollars on a pair of
+buckskin outing boots and eight dollars on a little corduroy hunting
+coat and skirt.  When the clothes arrived from the Chicago mail order
+house, Amos, Lizzie and Lydia had an exciting hour.  Amos had brought
+the package home from town with him, and supper had been held back
+while Lydia tried on the clothes.  Amos and Lizzie smiled when the
+young girl pranced out before them.  The suit was cheap but well cut,
+with belt and pockets and welted seams.  The soft buckskin shoes fitted
+the slender calves like velvet.  With her bright cheeks and her yellow
+hair above the fawn-colored corduroy, Lydia looked half boy, half woman.
+
+"My soul, Lydia, they're just grand!" cried Lizzie.
+
+"What boys are going in that crowd?" demanded Amos.
+
+"Charlie and Kent and--Margery's mother's given in--'Gustus Bach.  I
+told you.  Daddy, don't you like the suit?"
+
+"Like it!" exclaimed Amos.  "Lydia, I'm stunned by it!  It makes me
+realize my little girl's growing up to be a pretty woman.  I wish I
+could have bought you your first suit myself, Lydia.  But on a dollar
+and a half a day, I swan--"
+
+The brightness suddenly left Lydia's face.  "Oh, Daddy," she exclaimed,
+"I'm a pig to spend all this money on myself!  You take the rest of the
+money, for the note."
+
+Amos gave a laugh that was half gay, half grim.  "Lydia, you spend
+every cent of that money on yourself.  You've earned it in more ways
+than one.  I wish John Levine could see you in it.  I guess he will
+though.  Congress will rest most of the summer.  Let's have supper now."
+
+Lydia spun through her Junior examination blissfully.  For once marks
+and final averages were of little importance to her.  For the week
+after school closed, she was going camping!
+
+Charlie and Kent were making all the camp preparations.  Miss Towne and
+the three girls were to be at Lydia's gate with their suitcases at nine
+o'clock of a Monday morning.  Other than this, they had received no
+orders.
+
+Amos had been very sober when he said good-by to Lydia, at half past
+six.  "It's your first trip, Lydia.  Don't do anything you wouldn't
+want your mother to see."
+
+Lydia looked at him wonderingly, then threw her arms about his neck.
+"Oh, Daddy, I don't want to go off and leave you two whole weeks!"
+
+"It's too late to back out now.  Go on and have a good time," said
+Amos, picking up his dinner pail.  Lydia watched him down the road.
+Suddenly she realized how lonely her father must be without her mother.
+
+"I oughtn't to go, Lizzie," she said.
+
+"Shucks!  Think of all you'll have to tell us when you get home.  Don't
+be a cry baby, child."
+
+Promptly at nine Charlie and Kent whirled up to the gate in a carryall.
+The driver was the same man who had moved the Dudley family five years
+before.  He greeted Lydia with a grin.
+
+"You've grow'd some, eh, Lydia?  Where's the rest of the women folks?"
+
+"Here come Miss Towne and Olga!" cried Kent.  "Margery'll be late, of
+course."
+
+At nine-fifteen Margery was driven up in state by Elviry, and at
+nine-twenty the carryall was off to the north in a cloud of dust,
+leaving Adam howling dismally at the gate.
+
+For fifteen miles the way led up and down hill over a dusty country
+road that wound for the most part past great wheat farms and grazing
+lands, vividly green under the June sky.  Here and there were woods of
+young oak and birch, self sowed, replacing the pine long since cleared
+off.  For the last five miles there were few farms.  The rolling hills
+disappeared and low lying lakes, surrounded by marshes took their
+places.  The young rice bordering the lakes was tenderly green and the
+marshes were like fields of corn with their thick growth of cat-tail.
+Beyond the marshes the hills rose again, with the road winding like a
+black ribbon over their curving bosoms into the vivid sky beyond.
+
+"Where the hills begin again, that's the reservation," said Charlie.
+
+"Where are the pines?" asked Lydia.  "I thought it was all pines."
+
+"You'll see plenty, before the trip's over.  Just beyond that group of
+buildings is the reservation line."
+
+The buildings Charlie pointed to were the first that had appeared in
+several miles.  A two-story, unpainted frame house with several barns
+and sheds comprised the group.  There was a sign on the front of the
+house.
+
+"Last Chance," read Margery, as they clattered by.  "For goodness'
+sake!" she giggled, "is it a hotel?"
+
+"Look at all the women!  One in every window!" cried Olga.  "Why, they
+must have a lot of maids!  Do people come up here in the summer, Kent?"
+
+Kent gave Miss Towne an appealing glance.
+
+"It's a miserable, disreputable place, girls," said the teacher.  "Why
+look at that when you have these beautiful hills before you?  How far
+into the reservation do we go, Charlie?"
+
+"About four miles.  It's where I camp every year.  Margery, did you
+bring some paper dolls?"
+
+Margery dimpled and tossed her head.  "I wonder how old I'll have to be
+before you realize I'm grown up, Charlie!"
+
+Charlie looked at her critically.  "Well, when you're eighteen, maybe."
+
+"Lydia'll be twenty-five before she gets through looking like a baby,
+but Olga's a young lady now," said Kent.  He was eying the girls with
+the air of a connoisseur.  "Three peaches, aren't they, Miss Towne?"
+
+"I don't see why you say three," objected Gustus.  "Ask me and say
+four."
+
+The young people laughed and looked at Miss Towne, half startled by
+Gustus' audacity.  Miss Towne herself was blushing and Olga exclaimed,
+"Why, Miss Towne, you _are_ good looking when you blush!  And I don't
+believe you're so frightfully old!"
+
+It was true.  Miss Towne in her outing blouse, a soft felt hat crushed
+down on her brown hair, which was now wind-tossed and loosened, her
+smooth skin flushed, her gray eyes full of laughter, did not look her
+frightful age of thirty-five.  In fact, she looked charmingly young.
+Her youthful charges looked her over with frank amazement.  It was a
+tradition in the school to fear and dislike Miss Towne.  Charlie had
+asked a number of teachers to act as chaperone before he had approached
+Miss Towne.  She too had at first refused, then had said, "Well, it's
+Lydia's first outing.  I'll do it for her sake.  But don't tell her I
+said so."  Charlie had kept his own counsel and Miss Towne had delayed
+her summer trip to Europe, for the camping trip on the reservation.
+
+"Thank you, children, you brighten my old age very much.  Look at the
+neat farms we are passing."
+
+"Indian farms," said Charlie.  "This one belongs to Chief Cloud."
+
+"Are there many Indian farms?" asked Lydia.
+
+"No, there's not much use for Indians to farm.  The Agent is their
+middleman, and he eats up all the profits."
+
+"For the Lord's sake, Charlie," protested Kent, "don't begin any
+funeral oration!  We're no investigating committee.  We're out for some
+fun."
+
+"Second the motion," said Gustus.  "Can I smoke, Miss Towne?"
+
+Miss Towne gave Gustus a clear look.  He was a tall, thin boy of
+seventeen, with the dark eyes of the Rhine German and with thin
+hawk-like features that went with his hollow chest.  His father was a
+rich brewer and Gustus, always elegantly dressed, was very popular with
+the girls.  Margery had insisted on his being invited.
+
+"If I were a boy with a chest like yours, I wouldn't smoke," said Miss
+Towne, "but do as you please."
+
+With a nonchalant "Thanks," Gustus lighted a cigarette.
+
+"Going to stay in training all summer, Charlie?" asked Kent.
+
+"Yes," grunted Charlie, "but next summer I'll be through with football,
+and I'll smoke my head off."
+
+"Oh! the pines!" shrieked Lydia.
+
+A sudden silence fell.  The road, curving around a hill, had without
+warning entered the pine woods.
+
+In every direction as far as the eye could pierce stretched brown,
+columnar aisles, carpeted with the brown of needles and the green of
+June undergrowth: aisle on aisle, green arch on green arch, flecked
+with sunshine, mighty trunks supporting great swaying boughs, drooping
+with their weight of needles.
+
+Except for a muffled thud of horses' hoofs, the carryall moved
+soundlessly for the road was thick carpeted with needles.
+
+The others fell to chatting again, but Lydia was too moved for words.
+The incense of the pines, their curious murmuring stillness, roused in
+her memories that were perhaps half racial.  She never had been in a
+pine wood before, yet the hushed sense of solemnity it wakened in her
+was perfectly familiar.  Its incense breathed to her secrets she never
+had known, never would understand, yet it seemed to her startled fancy
+that she had known and understood them, always.
+
+She was still in a half dream when the blue of a lake glimmered beyond
+the far aisles and the carryall drew up with a flourish before three
+tents set in the pines on the water's edge.
+
+Charlie and Kent had made their preparations well and they displayed
+them proudly.  They had rented the three old A tents from the agent, as
+well as the seven canvas cots, the dishes and the cooking utensils.
+The middle tent had been arranged with a rough slab-table and benches
+for a dining- and living-room.  The boys' tent with three cots and the
+girls' with four, were crowded but comfortable.
+
+"The Indian school is closed for the summer," explained Charlie, "and
+the Agent was glad to make a little money extra.  He'll pocket it, you
+bet.  Everything's clean," he added hastily in answer to Miss Towne's
+lifting eyebrows.  "Blankets, cots and all, even the hammocks yonder, I
+had scrubbed with soap and water.  I don't live with a doctor for
+nothing."
+
+"It's very nice, indeed, boys," said Miss Towne.  "Come girls, get out
+your aprons.  I suppose you're all starved."
+
+"Wait!  Wait!" cried Kent.  "That's not the way this camp's going to be
+run.  Charlie, Gustus and me do the cooking.  You ladies are company
+and don't have to do anything except wash the dishes and make your own
+beds."
+
+"Gee!" exclaimed Lydia.  "I'd rather cook than wash dishes, any day."
+
+"I never wash dishes," protested Margery.
+
+"I can't do it either," said Olga.
+
+"Can you boys really cook?" asked Miss Towne, in her sharp way.
+
+"Yes, _Ma'am_!" replied Kent.  "Charlie learned in the Indian school,
+even baking, you know, and he's taught me a lot.  Gustus can peel
+potatoes, clean fish and such stunts."
+
+Gustus groaned but made no protest.
+
+"I think it's a very nice arrangement," decided Miss Towne.  "Come
+girls, let's unpack and arrange the tent."
+
+Kent's statement proved no idle boast.  The boys could cook.  And
+though the fare was simple during the entire holiday consisting of
+fish, caught in the lake, potatoes, baking powder biscuits and
+occasional additions of canned stuff, it was well prepared and there
+was plenty of it.
+
+The little camp quickly settled into an orderly routine.  The girls
+wrangled among themselves about the dish-washing and Gustus was
+inclined to complain over the number of potatoes he was obliged to
+peel, but beyond this the camp work caused little friction.
+
+Miss Towne was well supplied with French books and made, the young
+folks thought, an ideal chaperone.  She was tired after her year's work
+and spent almost all her time in a hammock.  She saw to it that the
+girls were in bed by ten o'clock and that all were accounted for at
+meal time.  Apparently, beyond this, she left her charges to their own
+devices.  She had taught in the High School too long not to know that
+spying and nagging are more demoralizing than no chaperoning at all.
+
+There was a very early pairing off in the camp.  Kent devoted himself
+to Olga, Gustus to Margery and Charlie to Lydia.  Kent and Olga kept
+the camp supplied with fish.  Excepting at meal time and the bathing
+hour, they spent the day in a birchbark canoe on the lake.  Gustus and
+Margery were the least strenuous of the party and caused Miss Towne, as
+a consequence, more uneasiness than the rest.  They spent long hours
+sitting side by side in a hammock, talking, heaven knows of what!  In
+the evening when the camp-fire was lighted they were always being
+routed out of the shadows by the others and teased into joining the
+story telling and singing.
+
+Charlie undertook to show to Lydia the reservation as the Indians knew
+it.  If Lydia was a little puzzled by his eagerness to make her
+understand conditions on the reservation, she gave little thought to
+the riddle.  This adventure was affecting her deeply.  There was the
+sudden freedom and relaxation from home responsibilities.  There was
+the daily and intimate companionship with young people, than whom none
+were better dressed than she!--and there were the pines.
+
+She knew and loved the woods at home.  But they were second growth
+hardwood and birch, and had little in common with the splendor of the
+pines.  Waking early in the morning, she would creep from the tent and
+steal beyond sound and sight of the camp.  There in the cathedral
+beauty of the pines she would stand drawing deep breaths and staring as
+if her eyes must pierce through the outward solemn loneliness of the
+forest, to its deeper meaning.  She often wondered if in his search for
+God, John Levine had ever stood so.
+
+Tramping through the woods with Charlie, she did not talk much, nor did
+he.  They visited one or two neat Indian farms, but for the most part
+Charlie led her from one wick-i-up to the other, deep set in recesses
+of the wood, where the only whites to intrude on the Indians were the
+occasional government wood cruisers.  These wick-i-ups were hovels,
+usually in the last stages of poverty and desolation.  A squaw,
+braiding reed mats, a buck returning with a string of fish, a baby
+burrowing in the moss--all of them thin, ragged and dirty, and about
+them the hallowed beauty and silence of the primeval pines; this was
+the picture Lydia carried of most of the dwellers in these huts.
+Sometimes the wick-i-up was occupied by a solitary Indian, nearly
+always sick and always old.
+
+Once they came upon a white haired squaw crawling feebly from her
+doorway toward a fish that lay at the foot of a tree.  Charlie picked
+up the fish and he and Lydia helped the old woman back to her hut.  In
+the hut was an iron pot and a pile of reed mats.  That was all.
+
+"She says," explained Charlie, "that she's been sick all winter and
+she'd have starved to death only one of her neighbors drops a fish for
+her there, every day or so."
+
+"Let's get some food for her at the camp," said Lydia eagerly.
+
+Charlie shook his head.  "What's the use!  It would just prolong her
+agony.  She's nearly dead now.  The old can go.  It's the young ones'
+starving that hurts me."
+
+He led Lydia out and again they tramped through the long green aisles.
+It was later in the day that they came upon a wick-i-up where there
+were three children, besides the father and mother.  Two of the
+children were half blind with eye trouble.  The whole family was
+sitting in the sun, about a pot of fish.  The grown-ups chatted eagerly
+with Charlie, and he translated for Lydia.
+
+"They say it's been a fearful winter.  They only had ten dollars this
+year out of their Government allowance and they couldn't get work.
+They lived on fish and potatoes.  The Catholic priest gave them some
+wild rice.  The baby froze to death or starved, or both.  We'll bring
+some food over to these folks, Lydia, because there are kids--eh?"
+
+"But, Charlie, what's the Government allowance?"
+
+"Oh, didn't you know?--and you're one of the white lords of creation
+too!  The Government set aside this land for the Indians in solemn
+treaty with them, for ever and ever.  Then it deliberately sold off a
+big block of it and deposited the money at Washington.  The income from
+this was to be given to the Indians.  There's over two million dollars
+there.  But by the time it's filtered from Washington to the Indians,
+this is the result."  He nodded at the half-starved group about the
+fish pot.  "Damn the dirty, thieving whites," he said, quietly.
+
+Lydia had had four days of this.  As they made their way back to the
+camp for supper, she said to him, in an unsteady voice, "Charlie, I
+can't stand it!  Think of that baby that froze to death.  And all these
+beautiful woods are full of half-starved Indians!  Charlie, I can't
+stand it!"  And Lydia bowed her head on her arm and leaned against a
+tree trunk.
+
+"Good Lord, Lydia!" exclaimed Charlie, "I didn't want you to feel that
+bad!  I just wanted you to see, because you're Levine's friend and
+because I like you so much.  Please, don't cry!"
+
+"I'm not crying," Lydia lifted reddened eyes to his, "I was just
+thinking.  What can I do about it, Charlie?"
+
+"You can't do anything.  It's too late.  But I wanted you to see.  I
+don't care what girl understands as long as you do.  I think an awful
+lot of you, Lydia."
+
+He took Lydia's hand and patted it.  Lydia looked up at him, thrilled
+by his bronze beauty and the note in his voice.
+
+"If I were a white man," said Charlie, "I'd make you love me and marry
+me.  But I'm an Indian and sooner or later I'll go back to my people.
+I'm just making believe I can play the white man's game for a while."
+He eyed Lydia wistfully.  "But we'll be friends, eh, Lydia?--Always?
+Even if I go back to the wick-i-up, you'll be my friend?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Charlie, always," replied Lydia, earnestly, even while there
+flashed through her head the half whimsical thought, "Queer kinds of
+men want to be friends with me, Mr. Levine, Mr. Marshall, and Charlie.
+And they all hate each other!"
+
+After this episode, Charlie was less strenuous about showing Lydia
+Indian conditions.  That night he resumed a mild flirtation with Olga
+that he had dropped when school closed and Olga met him more than half
+way.
+
+"Wouldn't that come and get you!" growled Kent to Lydia as Charlie and
+Olga paddled away in the canoe, the next morning.  "Have you and
+Charlie had a fight?"
+
+"Nope," replied Lydia.  "But I got sick of investigating the
+reservation.  Are you and Olga mad at each other?"
+
+"Not so very!  Say, Lyd, let's kill time," Kent interrupted himself
+with a yawn, "with a tramp up to the settlement for some gum."
+
+Lydia stifled an elaborate yawn, at which Kent grinned.  "All right, I
+can stand it if you can," she said.  "Will you come along, Miss Towne?"
+
+Miss Towne, who had been highly edified by the morning's maneuvering
+shook her head and settled herself in her hammock.  "No eight mile walk
+for me.  I'm taking a rest cure.  Better wear a hat, Lydia.  You're
+getting dreadfully burned."
+
+"That's right.  Your nose is peeling something fierce," said Kent as
+they started off.
+
+"Huh, yours looks like a pickled beet," returned Lydia.  "Come on,
+pretend I'm Olga and be happy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE CAMP
+
+
+"The humans I have known lack root hold.  Perhaps that is why they die
+and leave no trace."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+There was no clear-cut trail between the camp and the settlement.  The
+settlement lay four miles northeast and there were little-used,
+needle-covered roads to be found that led here, there and everywhere,
+over which the initiated could find the way to the store.
+
+But Lydia and Kent did not want to use the roads.  It was with the old
+familiar sense of make believe adventure that they started on what they
+called a Bee-line southwest.  And it was mid-afternoon before, hungry
+and leg weary, they reached the store that backed up against the Indian
+school!
+
+They bought sardines, crackers and cheese and ate them perched on a dry
+goods box near the hitching rack.
+
+"There!  I feel happier," said Kent as he threw away the empty sardine
+cans.  "How are you, old lady?"
+
+Lydia swung her feet contentedly.  "Fine!  Let's start back.  We'll be
+there by supper time, I'm sure we know the way now."
+
+Kent nodded, offered Lydia a stick of gum, took one himself, put a huge
+supply in his pocket and they were off.
+
+But alas for the vanity of amateur woods-craftsmen!  The late June dusk
+found them still threading the endless aisles of pine, their sense of
+direction completely obscured by the sinking of the sun.
+
+"Scared, Lyd?" inquired Kent as they paused for a moment's rest on a
+log.
+
+"No, but I'm awful hungry and I've chewed gum till I'll scream if I see
+another piece.  We ought to come on another wick-i-up soon."
+
+"We've come on a dozen of them," grumbled Kent.  "If we could make the
+Indians understand where the camp is, it would be all right.  And I
+don't know what Charlie's Indian name is, so that doesn't help."
+
+Lydia drew a trifle closer on the log to Kent.  "Supposing we have to
+stay out here all night!"  She shivered a little.
+
+"Well, I'd light a fire," said Kent in a matter of fact manner that
+Lydia suspected was assumed, "and fix you up on a bed of pine needles.
+Then I'd stand guard all night, like a little tin hero."
+
+"No, we'd guard in turns," corrected Lydia.  "Kent, what's the use of
+starting on until the moon comes up?"
+
+"None at all," returned the boy.  "It's due about nine, isn't it!  I
+hope the folks won't worry about us.  In the meantime, you and I can
+have a good old talk, like the old days.  Remember?"
+
+It was entirely dark now in the woods.  Fireflies darted about.
+Crickets shrilled and an occasional owl hooted.  Lydia moved still
+closer to Kent, until his shoulder touched hers.
+
+"I remember!  Kent, are you afraid?"
+
+"I should say not!  I like the woods at night.  Don't the fern and the
+needles smell fine?  Lyd, what're you going to do after you finish High
+School?"
+
+"Go on to the University.  Aren't you?"
+
+"Dad wants me to, but I guess I'll go to work.  Why waste four years
+learning a lot of stuff that'll never earn me a cent?"
+
+"But you could take engineering, or law."
+
+"All lawyers are crooks and I've no head for figures.  I'm going into
+the real estate business.  There's real money in that, particularly if
+Levine gets his bill through.  What do you want to go to the University
+for?"
+
+"Kent, I promised Mother I'd go.  And I want to anyhow.  We're so poor,
+that I'll never be anything but a scrub woman if I don't get educated.
+And all our folks back East were college people, even if they were
+farmers--all but Dad.  He thought he was too smart to go to college."
+
+Kent stirred uncomfortably.  "I don't think I'm too smart, but I want
+to make money, quick."
+
+"I don't see what the hurry is.  Is it Olga?"
+
+"Of course it isn't Olga!  She's all right to flirt with and a peachy
+looker, but you don't suppose a fellow wants to marry every girl he
+gets crazy about!"
+
+"I didn't know," said Lydia, meekly.  "Nobody was ever crazy about me."
+
+"You aren't that kind, thank heaven.  If I ever catch you running round
+flirting, I'll slap your face."
+
+There was nothing humorous in Kent's tone, nevertheless Lydia giggled.
+"Lots you'd know about it when you don't see me for months at a time."
+
+"I'd know, never fear.  You're growing up the way a girl ought to.  I
+know all about it."
+
+Lydia sat, staring into the darkness, thinking this over.  She was
+getting an amount of comfort out of the conversation that made her
+realize how sore a spot there had been within her.
+
+"But why do you flirt?" she asked finally.
+
+"Aw, boys are that way.  You don't understand.  A fellow can't help
+flirting with girls like Margery and Olga--or any other old girl, as
+far as that goes."
+
+"Kent," asked Lydia, suddenly, "what's a hussy?"
+
+"Huh!" exclaimed Kent.  "What makes you ask that?"
+
+"What you said about flirting.  Election night there were lots of
+women, flashily dressed, around, and father said they were hussies.
+And I saw Gustus flirting with one of them, and some of the Senior
+boys, too.  And I saw some of the best dressed of the Indians with
+them."
+
+"You'd better ask your father," said Kent.
+
+"I did and he said I'd know when I got older."
+
+There was silence again.  The wind sighed through the pines, the
+crickets chirped, the all-hallowing scent of the pine enveloped them as
+if blown from some heavenly incense burner.  Kent was only seventeen.
+He sat staring with puzzled eyes into the darkness.  He tried to
+picture Olga putting a question like this to him, and failed.  A sudden
+realization of the loneliness of Lydia's unmothered girlhood, of her
+innocent faith in him, touched the best that was in him.  His voice was
+a little husky but he answered coolly.
+
+"A hussy, Lyd, is a flirt who's gone to the bad.  Those around Lake
+City chase after the students and the Indians who've got Government
+allowances, and get their money away from them."
+
+"Oh," said Lydia.  "Oh!"  Then thoughtfully, "Aren't men silly!"
+
+"Yes, they are," agreed Kent.  "And, Lyd, whenever you want to know
+about such things, you ask me.  It's a man's place to tell a girl the
+things she ought to know."
+
+"All right," replied Lydia, "and of course, you're just like a brother
+to me."
+
+"Oh, I don't feel so brotherly as--Gee, there's a fire, Lydia!"
+
+Faintly through the trees gleamed a distant blaze.  The two jumped to
+their feet and, weariness forgotten, started hastily toward it.
+
+"It's the camp crowd, I guess," said Lydia.
+
+"No, it isn't, it's a bunch of men," corrected Kent.  "Hold on a
+minute, Lydia.  Let's see what we're getting into."
+
+He pulled her into the shelter of a giant pine trunk and the two peered
+at the group around the fire.
+
+"Some kind of an Indian pow-wow, half breeds, mostly," whispered Kent.
+
+Lydia shivered.  "Don't they look fierce in the firelight," she
+murmured.  "Let's get out of here, Kent."
+
+"Shucks!  Be a sport, Lyd!  We'll watch them a minute, then I'll brace
+up and speak to 'em."
+
+There were six half breeds in "store" clothes and moccasins squatting
+around the blaze.  None of them was speaking.
+
+"They act as if they were waiting for some one," whispered Lydia, with
+some of the old thrill of pirate plays returning to her.  "Kent,
+they've all got guns!"
+
+"Hush!  There comes some one else.  For the love of cats!"
+
+John Levine emerged from the darkness of the forest into the fire glow.
+
+"How!" he grunted, slipping into an empty space, opposite the two
+eavesdroppers.
+
+"How," returned the Indians.
+
+Silence in the woods, except for the crackling fire.
+
+"Kent, let's go!  I don't want to listen, I don't want to know."  The
+cold sweat was standing on Lydia's forehead.
+
+Kent seized her arm.  "You've got to stay.  It's your business to
+know," he whispered sharply.
+
+"Where's Eagle's Feather?" asked Levine.
+
+"Sick," replied an Indian.
+
+John nodded.  "I got back from Washington today.  Big fight there.
+Marshall and his crowd, they'll make a big fight.  I may have to
+compromise.  I may make my bill read, only mixed bloods can sell their
+lands, not full bloods."
+
+"Good!" said an Indian.  "Full blood don't want to sell, anyhow."
+
+"Better for you mixed bloods," agreed Levine, "because you'll get
+higher prices for your land, but worse for us whites, for there'll be
+less land, unless--you mixed bloods should happen to swear the full
+bloods are mixed too."
+
+No one spoke for a minute, then a fat, yellow-faced half-breed laughed.
+"I'll swear old Chief Dawn had a white great-grandmother.  I'll get
+even with him, for throwing me out of the council."
+
+"Exactly," said Levine.  "It'll be a good way for all of you to pay up
+old debts.  Any of Marshall's men been up here lately?"
+
+After a pause, one of the younger Indians said, "Some young fellows
+been going through the woods measuring out a road and they acted like
+they was just out for a vacation when any one was around.  A year ago I
+see one of the fellows riding out with Marshall."
+
+Levine grunted.  Lydia's heart was pounding so hard that it really
+pained her.  She stared at John unbelievably.  Yet it was the same
+familiar, sallow face, with the gaunt look about the cheeks.  Only the
+eyes were strange.  Lydia had never seen them so hard, so searching
+before.  Kent was breathing deep and he did not loose his hold on her
+arm.
+
+"Well," said Levine, "is that all you folks have got to report, after
+six months?  What do you think I'm paying you for?"
+
+An old mixed blood, almost as dark as a full blood, removed his pipe
+from his mouth.  "All the shoes we buy this year made out of paper,
+cost four dollars, melt when they get wet.  Woman at Last Chance tell
+me Injun Agent tell her he gets those shoes from Marshall."
+
+"The hog!" grunted Levine.  "Anything more?"
+
+What more might have come Lydia did not know for an old squaw came
+tottering into the fire glow.  She was gray headed and emaciated.
+
+"Oh, that's our old squaw, Kent, remember?" whispered Lydia.
+
+"Shut up!" murmured Kent.
+
+The squaw made her way up to John.  There was something sinister in the
+look of her and he rose.
+
+"What you do now, white man," she snarled.  "Steal!  Steal more, eh?"
+
+Levine looked down on her and his voice was pitying.  "Why, you poor
+old devil, you look half starved."  He dug into his pocket and brought
+out a silver dollar.  "Go get some grub," he said.
+
+The old woman stared from the dollar to Levine's face and her voice
+rose to a shriek.
+
+"Steal!  Steal!  Make our young men drunk!  Make our young girls have
+babies that grow like these snakes," she pointed a trembling, scrawny
+finger at the scowling mixed bloods.  "White man--dirty fool--dirty
+thief," and she spat at Levine, at the same time striking the dollar
+from his hand.  It rolled out onto the needles and lay shining in the
+firelight.
+
+John stiffened and the mixed bloods watched him curiously.  But the
+squaw suddenly burst into the feeble yet deep drawn sobs of the old,
+and tottering over to the silver she picked it up.  "Hungry!" she
+sobbed.  "All the time much hungry."  And she started slowly away from
+the fire in the direction of Kent and Lydia's hiding-place.
+
+"Quick!" whispered Kent, and noiselessly the two ran back into the
+darkness of the woods, through which, however, a silver light was
+beginning to filter.  "There's the moon," he said in a low voice.  "Now
+I can find the lake."
+
+He took Lydia's hand and they hastened in silence toward the rising
+moon.  In less than half a mile they found the lake and far around its
+curving shore, the gleam of their own camp fire.
+
+"Holy Mike!  What do you think of that!" demanded Kent as they headed
+for the fire.  "Isn't Levine a wonder!"
+
+"Oh, Kent!" gasped Lydia.  "What shall we do!"
+
+"Do!" cried Kent.  "Why keep our mouths shut and see what happens.
+Lord, what an adventure!  Lyd, I wouldn't have missed this day for a
+hundred dollars!"
+
+Lydia scarcely heard him.  "John Levine!" she murmured.  "My best
+friend!  Oh, I can't believe it."
+
+"Shucks!  Why, that's life!  Gee, what rich pickings!  Me for the real
+estate business!"
+
+"Kent, it's stealing, just as my squaw said.  And it's just the
+meanest, dirtiest kind of stealing!"
+
+"It's nothing of the kind.  The whites have got to have that land and
+if a lot of sentimental grannies won't let us get it openly, we've got
+to get it quietly."
+
+They were nearing the camp now and Kent stopped and in the moonlight
+took Lydia by the shoulders.  "Look here, Lyd, don't you tell a soul
+about what we saw.  Promise me!"
+
+"I'll do nothing of the kind," snapped Lydia.
+
+The two stood staring at each other.  The lad, tall and broad, his dark
+face tense; the girl, slender, her fair hair shimmering, her eyes clear
+in the moonlight.
+
+"Promise!" repeated Kent.
+
+"I will not!" returned Lydia.
+
+Kent's hold on her shoulders tightened.  He wanted to box her ears and
+yet, as he gazed at the wistful, sensitive lips, he felt a sudden
+desire to kiss her.
+
+"Well, promise me, you'll say nothing while we're in camp, anyhow."
+
+Lydia hesitated.  After all, she thought, to whom could she tell the
+story and what could any one do!  "All right, I'll promise that," she
+agreed, slowly.
+
+Kent took his hands from her shoulders.  "Come on then, old lady.  Gee,
+this beats hanging poor old Florence Dombey under the willows.  Give me
+your hand and I'll tow you along."
+
+It was scarcely nine o'clock, after all, when they trudged into the
+camp.  Charlie and Gustus came in a moment later, having heard Miss
+Towne's call.
+
+"Oh, Lydia!  Lydia!  I've worried myself sick."  And the cruel Miss
+Towne, the grouchy Miss Towne, threw her arms about Lydia, with a
+little murmur that was curiously like a sob.
+
+"We were just going to the settlement for help," said Charlie, "though
+we were pretty sure nothing serious could have happened."
+
+"Of course nothing serious!" protested Kent.  "We were too smart to
+follow the roads and got lost going and coming.  We waited for the moon
+to come up and we haven't had anything to eat but chewing gum."
+
+"We saved your supper," said Margery.  "Come on, Gustus, we'll heat it
+for 'em."
+
+"Margery'd be a real human being, if she'd stay away from her mother,"
+observed Kent.  "For the love of Mike, let me sit down!"
+
+"Here, get in the hammock and let me fix the cushions for you!" cried
+Olga, who had been eying Lydia closely.
+
+"Thanks, I prefer the dining-room bench, right now," returned Kent.
+"Come on, Lyd.  Food!"
+
+Lydia was tired the next day and elected to stay in camp with Miss
+Towne while the others, including even Margery and Gustus, went on an
+all day strawberry hunt.
+
+Lydia lay in a hammock with a book all the morning, but the greater
+part of the time, Miss Towne observed, her eyes were fastened
+broodingly on the lake and not on the printed page.  The two went
+bathing alone, at noon, and afterward lay on the grassy shore, drying
+their hair.
+
+"Lydia, wasn't Kent nice to you, yesterday?" asked the chaperone,
+abruptly.
+
+Lydia turned a startled, sunburned face toward the questioner.  "Nice!
+Why, of course!  Kent's like my brother."
+
+"No man but a brother can be like a brother, my dear.  Always remember
+that.  What happened yesterday to worry you?"
+
+"Nothing that had anything to do with Kent.  Gosh!  I should say not!"
+
+"Lydia!" cried Miss Towne.  "Please don't use such dreadful language!
+If you knew how coarse it sounds!  Oh, my dear, I'm not trying to hurt
+your feelings," as she watched the scarlet face and quivering lips.
+"It's just that you are so fine, I can't bear to have you do anything
+that isn't fine.  I've been planning to talk to you for a long time
+about your slang.  Leave that sort of thing to Olga and the rest.  Use
+only the purest Anglo-Saxon.  Be a credit to your fine Puritan stock in
+speech.  You already are, in character."
+
+Lydia said nothing.  She sat struggling to keep back the tears when a
+horse's hoof beats sounded under the trees and Levine rode into the
+camp.
+
+Lydia had been wondering how, when she saw him in town, she was going
+to meet him, what she was going to say to him.  But now, her only
+thought was that here was the devoted friend who had understood her
+since babyhood.
+
+As he dismounted, she jumped to her feet.  "Oh, my dear Mr. Levine!  My
+dear!  My dear!" she cried and hair flying, she ran to him and threw
+her arms about his neck, burying her face against his rough corduroy
+coat.
+
+John threw a long arm about her, and held her to him closely, while
+with his free hand he smoothed back the glory of her hair.  And Miss
+Towne, watching, saw his long saturnine face transformed.
+
+"Why, Lydia, my little sweetheart!  I didn't realize you'd missed me
+so."  He held her silently for a moment, then, catching Miss Towne's
+gaze, he smiled.
+
+"Lydia has few loves, but they're strong," he said.  "I'm her foster
+father.  My name's John Levine."
+
+Lydia disengaged herself.  "And this is Miss Towne," she said, "my
+dearest teacher."
+
+"I've heard your praises sung for a long time," said Levine.
+
+"And I've heard Lydia sing yours," returned Miss Towne.
+
+"And no one else, I'll bet," laughed John.
+
+"Sit down," said the chaperone, with what dignity she could muster with
+her hair down her back, "while Lydia and I finish dressing."
+
+"You'll have lunch with us?" called Lydia as she retreated toward the
+tent.
+
+"Yes, but I can't stay longer.  Must be back in Lake City for supper,"
+replied Levine, tying up his horse.
+
+The luncheon was a success.  Lydia was delighted to put her hand to
+cooking again, and while Miss Towne set the table, John chatted with
+both of them of his Washington experiences.  He rode away immediately
+after he had finished eating.  Miss Towne wiped the dishes thoughtfully.
+
+"It's hard to realize that he's the scandalous John Levine," she said.
+"He's simply charming!"
+
+Lydia flared, flushed and subsided.  Never again, she realized, could
+she contradict aspersions cast on Levine's character.  And yet, how
+like a bad dream the episode of last night seemed.  If only it had been
+a dream!
+
+"You're not resentful still about my criticism of your slang using, are
+you, Lydia?" asked Miss Towne, anxiously.
+
+"No," muttered Lydia, "I deserved it."
+
+Miss Towne's face cleared.  "Well, then, tell me all about your friend.
+He interests me."
+
+Nothing could have soothed Lydia more in her half guilty feeling of
+having spied unfairly on John than to spend the rest of the afternoon
+in a history of his relationship to her family.
+
+Side by side in the hammock the two lay during the rest of the sunny
+summer afternoon, gazing up into the pines and talking of the curious
+personality that was making history for Lake City.  In after years,
+whenever she thought of Levine, Miss Towne's memory brought her two
+pictures--one of the tall, sardonic faced man clasping the golden
+haired girl in his arms.  The other was of pine boughs, murmuring sadly
+and persistently above the gentle flow of Lydia's young voice.
+
+That night the young people sat alone around the camp fire.  The
+chaperone complained of a headache and went to bed soon after supper.
+When she had disappeared, and the tent flap had dropped behind her,
+Gustus chanted softly,
+
+  "School's closed!
+  Teacher's dead!
+      Hooray!"
+
+and deliberately put his arm about Margery and kissed her.  Margery
+gave a little shriek but blushed and looked pleased and Gustus settled
+down with his head in her lap.  Margery sat looking into the fire, and
+smoothing Gustus' hair.
+
+Olga, who was sitting with Charlie on the opposite side of the blaze,
+her back against a log, arranged her skirts.  "Come on, Charlie," she
+said, with a glance at Kent.  And Charlie ensconced himself comfortably
+with his head on Olga's knee.
+
+Lydia, who was sitting with Kent, eyed this grouping with interest, and
+mingled with a little sense of shock and disapproval was just the least
+little feeling of regret that the boys didn't feel "crazy" about her.
+She was sitting bolt upright, with her cheeks flaming a little when she
+felt Kent's arm stealing round her.  She did not resist when he pulled
+her softly against him.  She was utterly surprised at the pleasurable
+sensation she experienced at having Kent's arm about her.  The others
+were singing but for once Lydia's throaty contralto did not join in.
+
+So this was spooning!  Of course, she wouldn't let anybody but Kent do
+this.  And what did it amount to, anyhow!  If this was all there was to
+spooning, why did people think it was wrong?
+
+Under cover of the singing, Kent giving her a little squeeze said,
+"Didn't think you were such a flirt, Lydia!  Let me put my head in your
+lap, will you?"
+
+"All right," said Lydia nonchalantly.  And presently she was smoothing
+Kent's hair, and he was holding her unoccupied hand.  It was the same
+crisp black hair Lydia had pulled in many a childish quarrel and Kent
+had held her hands many a time to keep her from slapping his face.  And
+yet there was a thrill about this!
+
+Kent evidently called this flirting.  Flirting!  Lydia began going back
+over the conversation with Kent that the eavesdropping episode had
+crowded from her thoughts.  Kent didn't respect girls that flirted and
+he told her he'd slap her if she flirted and yet, here he was!  Lydia
+went on smoothing the crisp hair, with the thin hand that had the
+callouses of hard work across the palm.
+
+The others were singing one of Lydia's favorite airs and she joined in.
+
+  "The thirst that from the soul doth rise
+  Doth ask a drink divine."
+
+She sang the words unthinkingly--and stopped.  John Levine was helping
+her in her search for God, and robbing and betraying the Indians as he
+did so!  And here was Kent, warning her against doing that which he was
+persuading her to do.  What was the matter with men!  Was there no
+trusting them?  And yet, she liked to "spoon" with Kent!
+
+"Oh," she thought, "I wish I knew more about men.  I wish I could ask
+Mother."
+
+And memory, like a gentle alarm clock rang its warning.  "Lydia," her
+father had said, "don't do anything you'd be ashamed to have your
+mother know."
+
+Lydia yawned and gave Kent's hair a little tweak.  "Get up, Kent, my
+foot's asleep," she said.
+
+Kent sat up.  The others sang on and Lydia said, "I thought you didn't
+want me to flirt."
+
+"I don't, but with me it's different!" replied Kent.
+
+Lydia jumped to her feet.  "You make me sick, Kent Moulton!" she
+snapped.  "All men make me sick.  I'm going to bed."  And she stalked
+off in her hunting boots, without a good night to any one.
+
+Kent looked after her with an expression half sheepish, half admiring.
+
+"What's the matter with Lyd?" asked Olga.
+
+"Doesn't care about the spooning bee," replied Kent.
+
+"Proper is Lydia's middle name," commented Gustus.
+
+"Lydia is absolutely O. K.," said Charlie.
+
+"Bet your life," agreed Kent.  "Get your big head over, Gustus, and
+give me a piece of Margery's knee."
+
+"Darn it," said Charlie, "Lydia's left the tent flap up.  We might as
+well go to bed."
+
+Which, after another song or two, they did.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LYDIA GIGGLES
+
+
+"Nature is neither cruel nor sad.  She is only purposeful, tending to
+an end we cannot see."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+The days flew lightly by, lightly for Lydia, too, in spite of the heavy
+secret she carried of Levine's plotting.  Lightly, in spite of the fact
+that Lydia was undergoing some soul-changing experiences in this short
+holiday, experiences that were to direct her life's course.
+
+The day before they broke camp, Lydia's old squaw appeared and asked
+for Charlie Jackson.
+
+Charlie and Kent were cooking dinner.
+
+"Dear me," said Miss Towne, "tell him to take the poor thing away,
+Lydia."
+
+"He must feed her, first," exclaimed Lydia, leading the old Indian over
+to the cooking shelter.
+
+Kent and Lydia exchanged glances as Charlie led the squaw--Susie, he
+called her--into the woods, after Lydia had heaped her old arms with
+food.  Kent and Gustus had put the dinner on the table and they all
+were seated at the meal when Charlie returned.
+
+"What did she want, Charlie?" asked Olga.
+
+"You wouldn't care if I told you," replied Charlie, grimly.  "But," he
+burst forth suddenly, "some day you whites will pay.  Some day the Japs
+or the Jews will do to you Americans what you've done to us."
+
+"Who cares!" cried Olga, pertly.  "Have a pickle, Charlie, and cheer
+up."  She pushed the pickle dish toward him.
+
+"Or some catsup," suggested Gustus, depositing the bottle by Charlie's
+plate.
+
+"Or a sardine," added Margery.
+
+Charlie's lips twitched and he smiled and Miss Towne sighed in a
+relieved way.  The meal progressed without a further crisis.
+
+After the dishes were done, Kent followed Lydia, who was strolling off
+for a last walk in the woods.
+
+"Do you suppose she told Charlie about Levine?" he asked, as he
+overtook her.
+
+"Look out, Charlie's coming," said Lydia and in a moment the Indian had
+joined them.
+
+"Look here, Lydia," he began, "Levine is up to some new cussedness.
+Old Susie came on him in council the other night with six of the worst
+half breeds in the reservation.  She lost her head and began to jaw him
+so she didn't find out what it was about.  And he's getting the last of
+my timber now.  Lydia, you've _got_ to help me.  When you get home,
+talk to Levine."
+
+"Getting the last of your timber!" exclaimed Kent.
+
+"Yes, the law lets 'em get the 'dead and down' stuff and who's going to
+swear it's fresh stuff that he cut this summer and will get out next
+winter?"
+
+"Do you mean he's up cutting your pines now?" cried Lydia, aghast.
+
+"No!  No!" impatiently.  "His half breeds do that."
+
+"But how does he come to be taking your wood?  Why don't you go to see
+him yourself?" asked Kent.
+
+"I can't answer either of those questions," replied Charlie, sullenly.
+
+The two young whites thought of the attack on Levine, and looked at
+each other apprehensively.
+
+"Won't the Indian Agent stop him?" asked Lydia.
+
+"He!  Why, he's deep in the mire himself with Dave Marshall.  My God,
+Margery Marshall went to New York on a blind Indian boy's pines!
+Lydia, save my pines for me!  They belong to my tribe.  My father kept
+them and so did his father for his people.  As long as they had those
+miles of pines, they had a place for the tribe to live.  Father was
+going to Washington three years ago to tell the president about the
+graft when they shot him from ambush.  If I put up a fight, they'll
+shoot me.  My father wanted me to learn white ways so I could protect
+the tribe.  And the more I learn of white ways the more I realize I'm
+helpless.  Lydia, won't you help us?"
+
+Neither Kent nor Lydia ever had seen Charlie thus before.  He was
+neither arrogant nor sullen.  He was pleading with a tragic
+hopelessness that moved his two hearers profoundly.
+
+"Oh, Charlie!  I _will_ try," cried Lydia.  "I truly will."
+
+"I knew you would," said Charlie, huskily, and he turned back abruptly
+to the camp.
+
+"Gee!" exclaimed Kent.  "Chapter number two!"
+
+Lydia stamped her foot.  "How can you speak so, Kent!  It's a frightful
+thing!"
+
+"Sure it's frightful, but it can't be helped.  The whites have got to
+have this land.  Might's right."
+
+"What makes the whites so crazy for it?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Money," returned Kent.
+
+Lydia stared about her.  Supposing, she thought, that she owned a
+hundred acres of this pine land.  She forgot Kent and concentrated
+every force of her mind on sensing what land ownership would mean.  And
+suddenly there woke in her, her racial hunger for land.  Suddenly there
+stirred within her a desire for acreage, for trees, soil, stream and
+shrub, a wide demesne that should be hers and her children's forever.
+She was still too young to trace the hunger back to its primal source,
+the desire for permanency, the yearning to possess that which is the
+first and the last of existence, which neither moth nor dust can
+corrupt nor thieves break through and steal.  But somewhere back in her
+still childish mind a lust for a wide domain of pine land bestirred
+itself to begin battle with the sense of right and justice that her
+heart of hearts told her Levine was outraging.
+
+"Are you really going to talk to Levine?"  Kent roused her from her
+reverie.
+
+"Yes!  Didn't I promise to?"
+
+"Lots of good it'll do," grunted Kent.  "And if you tell him we
+overheard him in the woods, I'll be sore."
+
+"I don't see why."
+
+"Because, after I finish High School, I'm going to tell him I know, to
+make him let me in on the deal.  Look here, Lyd, don't tell him I was
+with you, anyhow."
+
+"Oh, all right," replied Lydia, crossly.  "For goodness' sake, don't
+let's talk about it any more.  I don't see why men always have to be
+plotting!  I'm going back to camp and help pack."
+
+The driver arrived with the carryall at nine o'clock the next morning,
+and at mid-afternoon, Lydia was dropped at the gate, where Adam took
+possession of her.  It was earlier than she had been expected, and
+Lizzie had not returned from her Saturday marketing.  Lydia lugged her
+suitcase up the path, glad to be at home, yet murmuring to herself a
+little disconsolately.
+
+"Nothing to look forward to now, but school in the fall."
+
+The house seemed small and dingy to her, after the open splendor of the
+pine woods.  Old Lizzie had "let things go" and the rooms were dusty
+and disorderly.  Lydia dropped her suitcase in the kitchen.
+
+"I've just got to train old Lizzie," she said, "so that she won't leave
+her old carpet slippers and her apron in the middle of the kitchen
+every time she goes out.  And Dad just must quit leaving his pipe on
+the dining-room table.  I do wish we had Mission furniture instead of
+this everlasting old mahogany.  I just guess there's got to be some
+reforming in this house, this summer.  If I've got to leave off slang,
+Dad and Lizzie can leave off a few of their bad habits."
+
+She carried the suitcase on into her bedroom and Lizzie, coming in, hot
+and bundle-laden an hour later, found the living-room in immaculate
+order and Lydia, in an old dress, blacking the kitchen stove.
+
+"For the land's sake, child," said Lizzie as Lydia kissed her and took
+her bundles from her, "how tanned you are!  And you shouldn't have
+begun work the minute you got home."
+
+"I had to.  I couldn't stand the dirt," answered Lydia, briskly.  "Is
+Daddy all right?  You'll find your slippers where they belong, Lizzie."
+
+The old lady, in her rusty black alpaca which she always wore to town,
+gave Lydia a look that was at once reproachful and timid.  Lydia had
+shown signs lately of having reached the "bringing up the family" stage
+of her development and Lizzie dreaded its progress.
+
+Amos came in the gate shortly after six.  Lydia was waiting for him at
+the front door.  He looked suddenly shabby and old to Lydia and she
+kissed him very tenderly.  It required all the supper hour and all the
+remainder of the evening to tell the story of the camp and to answer
+Lizzie's and Amos' questions.  There were several episodes Lydia did
+not describe; that of the half breed council in the wood, for example,
+nor the "spooning" with Kent.
+
+It was ten o'clock when Amos rose with a sigh.  "Well, you had a good
+time, little girl, and I'm glad.  But I swan, I don't want you ever to
+go off again without me and Liz and Adam.  Adam howled himself to sleep
+every night and I'd 'a' liked to.  I'm going out to see if the chickens
+are all right."
+
+"I got everything that belongs to you mended up, Lydia," said Lizzie,
+following into the kitchen bedroom.
+
+Lydia looked from the gnarled old hands to the neat rolls of stockings
+on the bureau.  She had been wishing that Lizzie was a neat maid with a
+white apron!  A sense of shame overwhelmed her and she threw her arms
+about her kind old friend.
+
+"Lizzie, you're a lot too good to me," she whispered.
+
+Lydia was sitting on the front steps, the next afternoon, with a book
+in her lap and Adam at her feet, when Billy Norton called.  He stopped
+for a chat in the garden with her father, before coming up to greet
+Lydia.
+
+"He is awful homely.  A regular old farmer," she thought, comparing him
+with the elegant Gustus and with Kent's careless grace.
+
+Billy was in his shirtsleeves.  His blond hair was cropped unbecomingly
+close.  Lydia did not see that the head this disclosed was more finely
+shaped than either of her friends.  He was grinning as he came toward
+Lydia, showing his white teeth.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!  Awful glad you're back!"
+
+He sat down on the step below her and Lydia wrinkled her nose.  He
+carried with him the odor of hay and horses.
+
+"How's your mother?" asked Lydia.  "I'm coming over, to-morrow."
+
+"Mother's not so very well.  She works too hard at the blamed canning.
+I told her I'd rather never eat it than have her get so done up."
+
+"I'll be over to help her," said Lydia.  "We had a perfectly heavenly
+time in camp, Billy."
+
+"Did you?" asked her caller, indifferently.  "Hay is fine this year.
+Never knew such a stand of clover."
+
+"Miss Towne was grand to us.  And Kent and Charlie are the best cooks,
+ever."
+
+"Great accomplishment for men," muttered Billy.  "Are you going to try
+to sell fudge, this winter, Lyd?"
+
+"I don't know," Lydia's tone was mournful, "Daddy hates to have me.
+Now I'm growing up he seems to be getting sensitive about my earning
+money."
+
+"He's right too," said Billy, with a note in his voice that irritated
+Lydia.
+
+"Much you know about it!  You just try to make your clothes and buy
+your school books on nothing.  Dad's just afraid people'll know how
+little he earns, that's all.  Men are selfish pigs."
+
+Astonished by this outburst, Billy turned round to look up at Lydia.
+She was wearing her Sunday dress of the year before, a cheap cotton
+that she had outgrown.  The young man at her feet did not see this.
+All he observed were the dusty gold of her curly head, the clear blue
+of her eyes and the fine set of her head on her thin little shoulders.
+
+"You always look just right to me, Lyd," he said.  "Listen, Lydia.  I'm
+not going to be a farmer, I'm--"
+
+"Not be a farmer!" cried Lydia.  "After all you've said about it!"
+
+"No!  I'm going in for two years' law, then I'm going into politics.  I
+tell you, Lydia, what this country needs to-day more than anything is
+young, clean politicians."
+
+"You mean you're going to do like Mr. Levine?"
+
+"God forbid!" exclaimed the young man.  "I'm going to fight men like
+Levine.  And by heck," he paused and looked at Lydia dreamily, "I'll be
+governor and maybe more, yet."
+
+"But what's changed you?" persisted Lydia.
+
+"The fight about the reservation, mostly.  There's something wrong, you
+know, in a system of government that allows conditions like that.  It's
+against American principles."
+
+His tone was oratorical, and Lydia was impressed.  She forgot that
+Billy smelled of the barnyard.
+
+"Well," she said, "we'd all be proud of you if you were president, I
+can tell you."
+
+"Would you be!"  Billy's voice was pleased.  "Then, Lydia, will you
+wait for me?"
+
+"Wait for you?"
+
+"Yes, till I make a name to bring to you."
+
+Lydia flushed angrily.  "Look here, Billy Norton, you don't have to be
+silly, after all the years we've known each other.  I'm only fifteen,
+just remember that, and I don't propose to wait for any man.  I'd as
+soon think of waiting for--for Adam, as for you, anyhow."
+
+Billy rose with dignity, and without a word strode down the path to the
+gate and thence up the road.  Lydia stared after him indignantly.
+"That old _farmer_!" she said to Adam, who wriggled and slobbered,
+sympathetically.
+
+She was still indignant when John Levine arrived and found her toasting
+herself and the waffles for supper, indiscriminately.  Perhaps it was
+this sense of indignation that made her less patient than usual with
+what she was growing to consider the foibles of the male sex.  At any
+rate, she precipitated her carefully planned conversation with Levine,
+when the four of them were seated on the back steps, after supper,
+fighting mosquitoes, and watching the exquisite orange of the afterglow
+change to lavender.
+
+The others were listening to Lydia's account of her investigating tour
+with Charlie.
+
+"I shouldn't say it was the best idea in the world for you to be
+wandering through the woods with that young Indian," was Levine's
+comment when Lydia had finished.
+
+"I don't see how you can speak so," cried Lydia, passionately, "when
+this minute you're taking his pine wood."
+
+"Lydia!" said Amos, sharply.
+
+"Let her alone, Amos," Levine spoke quietly.  "What are you talking
+about, Lydia?"
+
+For a moment, Lydia sat looking at her friend, uncertain how much or
+how little to say.  She had idealized him so long, had clung so long to
+her faith in his perfection, that a deep feeling of indignation toward
+him for not living up to her belief in him drove her to saying what she
+never had dreamed she could have said to John Levine.
+
+"The Indians are people, just like us," she cried, "and you're treating
+them as if they were beasts.  You're robbing them and letting them
+starve!  Oh, I saw them!  Charlie showed the poor things to me--all
+sore eyes, and coughing and eating dirt.  And you're making money out
+of them!  Maybe the very money you paid our note with was made out of a
+starved squaw.  Oh, I can't stand it to think it of you!"
+
+Lydia paused with a half sob and for a moment only the gentle ripple of
+the waves on the shore and the crickets were to be heard Levine, elbow
+on knee, chin in hand, looked through the dusk at the shadowy sweetness
+of Lydia's face, his own face calm and thoughtful.
+
+"You're so good and kind to me," Lydia began again, "how can you be so
+hard on the Indians?  Are you stealing Charlie's logs?  _Are_ you, Mr.
+Levine?"
+
+"I bought his pine," replied Levine, quietly.
+
+"He doesn't believe it.  He thinks you're stealing.  And he's so afraid
+of you.  He says if he makes a fuss, you'll shoot him.  Why does he
+feel that way, Mr. Levine?"
+
+Lydia's thin hands were shaking, but she stood before the Congressman
+like a small accusing conscience, unafraid, not easily to be stilled.
+
+"Lydia!  What're you saying!" exclaimed Amos.
+
+"Keep out, Amos," said Levine.  "We've got to clear this up.  I've been
+expecting it, for some time.  Lydia, years ago before the Government
+began to support the Indians, they were a fine, upstanding race.  The
+whites could have learned a lot from them.  They were brave, and
+honorable, and moral, and in a primitive way, thrifty.  Well, then the
+sentimentalists among the whites devised the reservation system and the
+allowance system.  And the Indians have gone to the devil, just as
+whites would under like circumstances.  Any human being has to earn
+what he eats or he degenerates.  You can put that down as generally
+true, can't you, Amos?"
+
+"You certainly can," agreed Amos.
+
+"Now, the only way to save those Indians up there is to kick them out.
+The strong ones will live and be assimilated into our civilization.
+The weak ones will die, just like weak whites do."
+
+"But how about Charlie's pines?" insisted Lydia.
+
+Something like a note of amusement at the young girl's persistence was
+in John's voice, but he answered gravely enough.
+
+"Yes, I've bought his pines and I'll get them out, next winter.
+There's no denying we want the Indians' land.  But there's no denying
+that throwing the Indian off the reservation is the best thing for the
+Indian."
+
+"But what makes Charlie think you're stealing them?  And he says that
+when the pines go, the tribe will die."
+
+"I paid for the pine," insisted Levine.  "An Indian has no idea of
+buying and selling.  It's a cruel incident, this breaking up of the
+reservation, but it's like cutting off a leg to save the patient's
+life.  Sentiment is wasted."
+
+"That's the great trouble with America, these days," said Amos, his
+pipe bowl glowing in the summer darkness.  "All these foreigners coming
+in here filled the country with gush.  What's become of the New
+Englanders in this town?  Well, they founded the University, named the
+streets, planted the elms and built the Capitol.  Since then they've
+been snowed under by the Germans and the Norwegians, a lot of beer
+drinkers and fish eaters.  Nobody calls a spade a spade, these days.
+They rant and spout socialism.  The old blood's gone.  The old, stern,
+puritanical crowd can't be found in America to-day."
+
+Lydia was giving little heed to her father.  Amos was given to fireside
+oratory.  She was turning over in her mind the scene in the woods
+between John and the half breeds.  That then was a part of the process
+of removing the patient's leg!  The end justified the means.
+
+She heaved a great sigh of relief.  "Well, then, I don't have to worry
+about that any more," she said.  "Only, I don't dare to think about
+those starving old squaws, or the baby that froze to death."
+
+"That's right,"  agreed Levine, comfortably.  "Don't think about them."
+
+Old Lizzie snored gently, gave a sudden sigh and a jerk.  "Land!  I
+must have dozed off for a minute."
+
+Lydia laughed.  "It was nip and tuck between you and Adam, Lizzie.
+Let's get in away from the mosquitoes--I'm so glad I had this talk with
+you, Mr. Levine."
+
+"Lydia should have been a boy," said Amos; "she likes politics."
+
+"I'd rather be a girl than anything in the world," protested Lydia, and
+the two men laughed.  If there was still a doubt in the back of Lydia's
+mind regarding the reservation, for a time, at least, she succeeded in
+quieting it.  She dreaded meeting Charlie and was relieved to hear that
+Dr. Fulton had taken him East with him for a couple of weeks to attend
+a health convention.
+
+One of the not unimportant results of the camping trip was that Lydia
+rediscovered the pine by the gate.  It was the same pine against which
+she had beaten her little fists, the night of Patience's death.  She
+had often climbed into its lower branches, getting well gummed with
+fragrant pitch in the process.  But after her return from the
+reservation, the tall tree had a new significance to her.
+
+She liked to sit on the steps and stare at it, dreaming and wondering.
+Who had left it, when all the rest of the pines about it had been
+cleared off?  How did it feel, left alone among the alien oaks and with
+white people living their curious lives about it?  Did it mourn, in its
+endless murmuring, for the Indians--the Indians of other days and not
+the poor decadents who shambled up and down the road?  For the Indians
+and the pines were now unalterably associated in Lydia's mind.  The
+life of one depended on that of the other.  Strange thoughts and
+perhaps not altogether cheerful and wholesome thoughts for a girl of
+Lydia's age.
+
+So it was probably well that Margery about this time began to show
+Lydia a certain Margery-esque type of attention.  In her heart, in
+spite of her mother's teachings, Margery had always shared her father's
+admiration for Lydia.  In her childhood it had been a grudging, jealous
+admiration that seemed like actual dislike.  But as Margery developed
+as a social favorite and Lydia remained about the same quiet little
+dowd, the jealousy of the banker's daughter gave way to liking.
+
+Therefore several times a week, Margery appeared on her bicycle, her
+embroidery bag dangling from the handle bars.  The two girls would then
+establish themselves on cushions by the water, and sew and chatter.
+Lizzie, from the kitchen or from the bedroom where she was resting,
+could catch the unceasing sound of voices, broken at regular intervals
+by giggles.
+
+"Lydia's reached the giggling age," she would say to herself.  "Well,
+thank the Lord she's got some one to giggle with, even if Margery is a
+silly coot.  There they go again!  What are they laughing at?"
+
+Hysterical shrieks from the lawn, with the two girls rolling helplessly
+about on the cushions!  Overhearing the conversation would not have
+enlightened old Lizzie, for the girls' talk was mostly reminiscent of
+the camp experiences or of their recollections of Kent's little
+boyhood, of Charlie's prowess at school, or of Gustus' "sportiness" and
+his fascinating deviltry.  Lydia was enjoying the inalienable right of
+every girl of fifteen to giggle, and talk about the boys, the two
+seemingly having no causative relation, yet always existing together.
+
+Lizzie had not realized how quiet and mature Lydia had been since
+little Patience's death until now.  She would mix some lemonade and
+invite the girls into the house to drink it, just for the mere pleasure
+of joining in the laughter.  She never got the remotest inkling of why
+the two would double up with joy when one or the other got the
+hiccoughs in the midst of a sentence.  But she would lean against the
+sideboard and laugh with them, the tears running down her old cheeks.
+
+It was no uncommon occurrence during this summer for Amos to come on
+the two, giggling helplessly on a log by the roadside.  Lydia would
+have been walking a little way with Margery to come back with her
+father, when their mirth overcame them.  Amos had no patience with this
+new phase of Lydia's development.
+
+"For heaven's sake," he said to John Levine, one Sunday afternoon, when
+hysterical shrieks drifted up from the pier, "do you suppose I'd better
+speak to Doc Fulton or shut her up on bread and water?"
+
+"Pshaw, let her alone.  It's the giggles!  She's just being normal,"
+said John, laughing softly in sympathy as the shrieks grew weak and
+maudlin.
+
+The two did have lucid intervals during the summer, however.  During
+one of these, Lydia said, "I wish we had hard wood floors like yours."
+
+"What kind are yours?" inquired Margery.
+
+"Just pine, and kind of mean, splintery pine, too."
+
+"Upstairs at Olga's all the floors were that way," said Margery, "and
+they had a man come and sandpaper 'em and put kind of putty stuff in
+the cracks and oil and wax 'em and they look fine."
+
+"Gee!" said Lydia, thoughtfully.  "That is, I don't mean 'Gee,' I mean
+whatever polite word Miss Towne would use for 'Gee.'"
+
+The girls giggled, then Lydia said, "I'll do it!  And I'll cut our old
+living-room carpet up into two or three rugs.  Lizzie'll have to
+squeeze enough out of the grocery money for fringe.  I'd rather have
+fringe than a fall coat."
+
+Amos, coming home a night or so later found the living-room floor bare
+and Lydia hard at work with a bit of glass and sand paper, scraping at
+the slivers.
+
+"Ain't it awful?" asked Lizzie from the dining-room.  "She would do it."
+
+Lydia's knees and back had given out and she was lying on her stomach
+and one elbow, scraping away without looking up.
+
+"Lizzie's complained all day," she said.  "She doesn't realize how our
+house looks like 'poverty and destruction' compared with other folks.
+I'm going to get some style into it, if I have to tear it down.  Oh,
+Daddy, don't you get sick of being poor?"
+
+"Yes," said Amos, shortly, "and I think you're a silly girl to wear
+yourself out on this kind of thing."
+
+Lydia sat up and looked at him.  She was growing fast and was thinner
+than ever, this summer.  "If mother was alive," she said, "she'd know
+exactly how I feel."
+
+Suddenly there came to Amos' memory a weak and tender voice, with
+contralto notes in it like Lydia's, "Lydia's like me, Amos.  You'll
+never have trouble understanding her, if you'll remember that."
+
+"Lydia," he said, abruptly, "make the house over if you want to, my
+dear," and he marched out to the kitchen to wash and take off his
+overalls.
+
+It took Lydia several days to complete her task.  When it was done the
+cracks were still prominent and the oily finish was spotted.  But in
+Lydia's eyes it was a work of art and she cut the old carpet into three
+parts with enthusiasm.  She sewed the fringe on the rugs, on the front
+porch.  Sitting so, she could see Margery when she appeared far down
+the road, could view the beauty of the Nortons' wide fields, and could
+hear the quiet sighing of the pine by the gate.  On the afternoon on
+which she finished the last of the rugs, Charlie Jackson and not
+Margery appeared.  Lydia's heart sank a little as he turned in the
+gate, though in his greeting he seemed his usual genial self.
+
+He admired the rugs and the gleam of the shining floor through the
+doorway.  Then without preamble, he asked, "Did you talk to Levine,
+Lydia?"
+
+"Yes," she said.  "He--he just doesn't see it any way but his, Charlie!"
+
+The young Indian's face fell.  "I certainly thought you could influence
+him, Lydia.  Did you really try?"
+
+"Of course I tried," she exclaimed, indignantly.  "He insists that the
+only way to save you Indians is to make you work for a living."
+
+"He's doing it all for our good, huh?" sneered Charlie.
+
+"He doesn't pretend.  He says he wants the land.  He's paying for it
+though."
+
+"Paying for it!" cried the Indian.  "How's he paying, do you know?"
+
+"No, and I don't want to know!  I'm tired of hearing things against Mr.
+Levine."
+
+"I don't care if you are," said Charlie, grimly.  "If you're going to
+keep on being his friend, you've got to be it with your eyes open.  And
+you might as well decide right now whether you're going to take him or
+me for your friend.  You can't have us both."
+
+"I wouldn't give up Mr. Levine for any one on earth."  Lydia's voice
+shook with her earnestness.  "And I don't see why I have to be dragged
+into this business.  I've nothing to do with it."
+
+"You have too!  You're white and it's every white's business to judge
+in this.  You'll be taking some of the profits of the reservation if
+it's thrown open, yourself."
+
+"I will not!" cried Lydia.  "I wouldn't want an inch of that land."
+Then she caught her breath.  Something within her said, "Wouldn't,
+eh--not the vast acres of cathedral pines, you thought of as yours, at
+camp?"  She flushed and repeated vehemently, "Not an inch!"
+
+Charlie smiled cynically.  "Listen, Lydia, I'll tell you how Levine
+pays for his Indian lands."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR
+
+
+"Where the pine forest is destroyed, pines never come again."--_The
+Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia sighed helplessly and began to stitch again on the fringe,
+thrusting her needle in and out viciously.
+
+"Years ago," began Charlie, grimly, "my father foresaw what the whites
+were trying to do.  None of the other full bloods believed him.  He had
+nothing to do with half-breeds."
+
+"I don't see why you always speak so of the mixed bloods," interrupted
+Lydia.  "Their white blood ought to improve them."
+
+"It ought, yes,--but it doesn't.  And the reason is that only the
+rottenest kind of a white man'll make a squaw a mother.  And only the
+low harpies in places like Last Chance will let an Indian father a
+child."
+
+Lydia flushed but compressed her lips and let Charlie speak on.  She
+knew that it was useless to try to stem the tide of protest that was
+rising to his lips.
+
+"Father was the chief of the tribe and he called council after council
+until at last they all decided he'd better go to Washington and see if
+he could get help from the Indian Commissioner.  Even then John Levine
+had a following of half-breeds.  He told the yellow curs to kidnap my
+father and he'd see if he could make him more reasonable.  So the
+half-breeds laid in ambush the day father started for Washington.
+Father put up an awful fight and they killed him!"
+
+"Oh, Charlie!" cried Lydia, dropping her sewing.  "Oh, Charlie!"
+
+"Yes," said the Indian, tensely, "and though Levine wasn't there he was
+just as much my father's murderer as if he'd fired the shot.  Of
+course, nothing was ever done by the authorities.  It was hushed up as
+an Indian brawl.  But my sister, she was twenty then, she found out
+about Levine and she came in and set fire to his house one night,
+thinking she'd burn him to death.  Instead of that, she just scared his
+old hired man who was drunk.  Levine was away from home.  But he's a
+devil.  He found out it was my sister and he told her the only way she
+could keep from being jailed was to sell him all our pines--for a
+hundred dollars.  So she did, but she shot at him that Thanksgiving
+night when he'd been at your house."
+
+"Oh, _Charlie_!" whispered Lydia, horror in her blue eyes and her
+parted lips.  She looked at him in utter dismay.  No longer was he the
+debonair favorite of the High School.  In his somber eyes, his thin
+cold lips, his tense shoulders, the young girl saw the savage.  She
+looked from Charlie to the familiar garden, to Adam, scratching fleas,
+and beyond to the quiet herds in the Norton meadows.  Surely Charlie's
+tale of killings had no place in this orderly life.  Then her glance
+fell upon the pine beside the gate.  It murmured softly.  Again Lydia
+saw the cloistered depths of the reservation pines and again there
+stirred within her that vague lust for ownership.  And she knew that
+Charlie's tale was true.
+
+She moistened her dry lips.  "But what can I do, Charlie!  I'm only a
+girl."
+
+"I'll tell you what you can do.  You can throw down your murderer
+friend and side with me.  You can get every one you know to side with
+me.  And, Lydia, never tell Levine, or any one else, what you know
+about him.  It wouldn't be safe!"
+
+He leaned toward her as he spoke and Lydia shivered.  "I won't," she
+whispered.  Then she said aloud in sudden resentment, "But I'm not
+going to throw Mr. Levine down without his having a chance to explain.
+Who are you to think you've got a right to ask me?"
+
+Charlie caught her slender wrist in a firm grasp.  "I'm a human being
+fighting for justice--no--fighting for existence.  That's who I am."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to know about it!" cried Lydia.  "I don't want to
+think about it!  I'm just a girl.  I want to be happy just a little
+while before I grow up.  I've had too much unhappiness."
+
+"Yes, you have had," agreed Charlie, grimly, "and that's why you will
+think about it in spite of yourself.  You understand how I feel because
+you've suffered.  When are you going to throw Levine down?"
+
+Lydia's face whitened.  "Never!" she said.
+
+"What!  When you know he's a murderer?"
+
+"He never intended to kill your father.  Anyhow, I can't help what he's
+done.  He's like my own father and brother and mother all in one to me."
+
+The two young people sat looking into each other's eyes.  Suddenly
+Charlie threw Lydia's hand from him, and like Billy Norton, he strode
+down the path and out of the gate without a word.  Lydia was trembling
+violently but she picked up her sewing and forced herself to finish the
+rugs and spread them on the living-room floor.  They looked very well,
+she thought.  Later on, they showed a vicious tendency to turn up, to
+wrinkle and scuffle easily, threatening the life and limb of the heavy
+treading Lizzie and of Amos a dozen times a day.  But the evening after
+Charlie's visit she was too distrait to notice the complaints of her
+elders.
+
+Levine did not appear at the cottage for several days.  During that
+time Lydia tried to put Charlie's story out of her mind.  With
+housework and swimming and giggling with Margery, she managed to do
+this during the day, but at night she dreamed of it and woke, and spoke
+to Adam.
+
+When John did come out she avoided talking to him and he caught her
+several times looking at him with a sad and puzzled expression.  When
+they started on their usual Sunday walk, Amos went back to the house
+for his cane and Levine said, abruptly, "Out with it, young Lydia!"
+
+"I promised I wouldn't," she said.
+
+"Been hearing more stories about my wickedness?" asked John.
+
+Lydia nodded, miserably.
+
+"My dear," Levine said quietly, "this is a man's game.  I'm playing a
+rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can fight.  In it, the weak must fail
+and maybe die.  But out of it a great good will come to this community.
+As long as the Indians are here to exploit, this community will be
+demoralized.  I'm using every means fair or foul to carry my purpose.
+Can't you let it go at that?"
+
+Lydia set her teeth.  "Yes, I can and I will," she said, as her father
+came up with his cane.
+
+And though this was more easily said than done and the thought of
+murdered chiefs and starved babies troubled her occasionally, she did
+not really worry over it all as much as she might have were she not
+entering her senior year in the High School.
+
+If life holds any position more important, any business more soul
+satisfying than that of being a High School senior, few people are so
+fortunate as to have discerned it.  Being a college senior is a highly
+edifying and imposing business, but the far greater advantages lie with
+the High School senior.  He is four years younger.  He has lost no
+illusions.  He has developed no sense of values.  He is not conscious
+of the world outside his vision.  But in spite of a smug conviction of
+superiority, the college senior has heard life knocking at the door of
+his young illusions.  He has moments of wistful uncertainty.  No, it is
+the High School senior who is life's darling.
+
+Lydia was not altogether an easy person to live with this year although
+both Lizzie and Amos realized that never had she been so altogether
+sweet and lovable as now.  She objected to Lizzie's table manners.  She
+was hurt because Amos would eat in his shirt-sleeves, and would sit in
+his stocking feet at night, ignoring the slippers she crocheted him.
+She stored in the attic the several fine engravings in gilt frames that
+her father and mother had brought with them from New England.  In their
+place she hung passepartouted Gibson pictures clipped from magazines.
+And she gave up reading tales of travel and adventure, gave up Dickens
+and Thackeray and Mark Twain and took to E. P. Roe and other writers of
+a sticky and lovelorn nature.
+
+In spite of the camping trip, Lydia saw little of her campmates.
+Charlie did not reenter school in the fall.  Olga and Gustus were
+devoted to each other and, to Lydia's surprise, Kent took Margery to
+several parties.
+
+"I thought you liked Gustus best," she said to Margery one Saturday
+afternoon late in the fall.  Lydia was calling on Margery and the two
+were making fudge.
+
+"Oh, that was last year!  Gustus is too sickly for me.  I'm crazy about
+Kent.  He's so big and strong and bossy!"
+
+A little pang shot through Lydia's heart.  But she was saved a reply by
+Elviry, who as usual was within earshot.
+
+"Kent Moulton doesn't amount to anything.  His father's got nothing but
+a salary.  Gustus'll have the brewery."
+
+"Well, who wants to marry a brewery," sniffed Margery.  "If you think
+I'm going to have any old bossy, beery German like Gustus'll be, you're
+mistaken.  Kent comes of fine Puritan stock."
+
+"Your ancestors don't pay the bills," said Elviry, sharply.  "If your
+father has that extra money he's expecting at Christmas time, you'll
+just go East to boarding-school, Margery."
+
+"I don't want to go," protested Margery.  "I love High School."
+
+"Makes no difference.  You have common tastes, just like your father.
+I want you should have refined tastes in your friends particularly."
+
+And Dave must have received his extra money, for after the Christmas
+holidays, Margery tearfully departed for the Eastern finishing school.
+The night after her departure, Kent made his first call on Lydia in
+many months.  The two withdrew to the kitchen to make candy and there
+Lydia's surprise and pleasure gave way to suspicion.  Kent seemed to
+want to talk for the most part about Margery!
+
+"Hasn't she grown to be a beauty," he said, beating the fudge briskly.
+
+"She always was beautiful," replied Lydia, who was cracking walnuts.
+"Didn't we use to hate her though!  Well, she was the whiniest little
+snip!"
+
+"Oh, that was her mother's fault!  The only good thing about this
+boarding-school deal is that it gets her away from Elviry Marshall.
+Put more nuts in here, Lyd.  You like her now, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, I do," replied Lydia, honestly, "though she's an awful silly.
+She never reads anything, and she flunked all her Thanksgiving
+examinations."
+
+"Anybody as pretty as Margery doesn't need to be brilliant," said Kent.
+
+"And she spoons, and you don't think much of girls that spoon."
+Lydia's cheeks were a deeper pink than usual.
+
+"Shucks, don't be catty, Lydia!" growled Kent.
+
+Lydia suddenly chuckled, though tears were very near the surface.
+"Well, when I'm an old maid here in the cottage, you and Margery can
+come out and call in your automobile."
+
+"Who's talking about marrying or you being an old maid?" asked Kent,
+disgustedly.  "Gee, you girls make me sick!"
+
+Lydia's jaw dropped.  Then she gave a laugh that ended abruptly.
+"Heavens, how clothes do count in life," she sighed.  "Come on in and
+give Dad and Lizzie some fudge, Kent."
+
+Kent called several times during the winter, but he never asked Lydia
+to go to a party nor did any of the other boy friends she saw daily in
+school--boys with whom she chummed over lessons, who told her their
+secrets, who treated her as a mental equal, yet never asked to call, or
+slipped boxes of candy into her desk or asked her into a drugstore for
+a sundae or a hot chocolate.
+
+Nobody resented this state of affairs more than old Lizzie.  After
+Kent's third or fourth call, she said to Lydia, closing the door behind
+him, "Yes, Kent'll come out here and see you, but I notice he don't
+take you anywhere.  If you had fine party clothes and lived on Lake
+Shore Avenue, he'd be bowing and scraping fast enough."
+
+Lydia tossed her head.  "I don't care about going to parties."
+
+"You do, too," insisted the old lady.  "You're eating your heart out.
+I know.  I was young once."
+
+Amos looked up from his paper.  "Lydia's too young to go if they did
+ask her.  But why don't they ask?"
+
+"It's because I'm too poor and I live so far out and I don't spoon,"
+answered Lydia.  "I don't care, I tell you."  And just to prove that
+she didn't care, Lydia bowed her face in her hands and began to cry.
+
+A look of real pain crossed Amos' face.  He got up hastily and went to
+Lydia's side.
+
+"Why, my little girl, I thought you were perfectly happy this year.
+And your clothes look nice to me."  He smoothed Lydia's bright hair
+with his work-scarred hand.  "I tell you, I'll borrow some money, by
+heck, and get you some clothes!"
+
+Lydia raised a startled face.  "No!  No!  I'd rather go in rags than
+borrow money.  We're almost out of debt now and we'll stay out.  Don't
+borrow, Daddy," her voice rising hysterically.  "Don't borrow!"  Adam
+began to howl.
+
+"All right, dearie, all right!" said Amos.
+
+"I'm an old fool to have said anything," groaned Lizzie.  "What does it
+matter when she's the best scholar in her class and everybody, teachers
+and boys and girls alike, loves her."
+
+Lydia wiped her eyes and hugged her father, then Adam and then Lizzie.
+
+"I've got John Levine, anyhow," she said.
+
+"You certainly have, hand and foot," said Amos.
+
+The matter was not mentioned again directly.  But the little scene
+rankled with Amos.  A week or so later he said at supper, "Lydia, I'm
+thinking seriously of moving."
+
+"Moving!  Where?  Why?" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"Well, I can borrow enough money, I find, to add to the rent we're
+paying, to rent the old stone house next to Miss Towne's.  My idea is
+to move there just till you finish college!  Then we'll go out on a
+farm.  But it'll give you your chance, Lydia."
+
+"Land!" murmured Lizzie.
+
+Lydia hesitated.  To move into the house next the Townes would be to
+arrive, to enter the inner circle, to cease to be a dowd.  But--she
+looked about the familiar rooms.
+
+"Daddy," she said, "would you really want to leave this cottage?"
+
+"I'd just as soon," replied Amos.  "Most places are alike to me since
+your mother's death.  I could stand doing without the garden, if I had
+the farm to look forward to."
+
+"How'd we pay the money back?" asked Lydia.
+
+"After the Levine bill passes," said Amos, "I'll have a section of
+pines."
+
+Instantly Lydia's sleeping land hunger woke and with it the memory of
+Charlie's tales.  She sat in deep thought.
+
+"Daddy," she said, finally, "we're not going to borrow, and we're not
+going to move again.  I don't see why people want to keep moving all
+the time.  I love this place, if it is only a cottage, and I'm going to
+stay here.  I wish we could buy it and hand it down in the family so's
+it would be known forever as the Dudley place.  Then nobody'd ever
+forget our name.  What's the use of trying to make a splurge with
+borrowed money?  We thought it was awful when the Barkers mortgaged
+their house to buy an automobile."
+
+"All right," said Amos, reluctantly.  "But remember, you've had your
+chance and don't feel abused about our poverty."
+
+"I won't," replied Lydia, obediently.
+
+And to her own surprise, she did feel less bitter about her meager,
+home-made clothing.  She had had a chance to improve it and had
+resisted the temptation.
+
+She told Ma Norton of Amos' plan, and her refusal.  Ma heard her
+through in silence.  They were sitting as usual in the kitchen of the
+Norton farmhouse.  Lydia ran over nearly every Saturday afternoon but
+she seldom saw Billy.  Amos had refused to allow Lydia to continue
+fudge selling and Ma supposed that that was why her son never spoke of
+Lydia or was about when she called.
+
+"You did exactly right, Lydia," was Ma's verdict.  "And you mustn't lay
+it all to clothes, though I've always maintained that party-going boys
+were just as silly about clothes as party-going girls.  You're old for
+your age, Lydia.  It takes older men to understand you.  I suppose your
+class has begun to talk about graduation.  It's March now."
+
+"Yes," said Lydia.  "We've chosen the class motto and the class color.
+I was chairman of the motto committee and we chose Ducit Amor
+Patriae--and purple and white's our color."
+
+"For the land's sake," murmured Ma.  "Why do you children always choose
+Latin or Greek mottoes?  Hardly anybody in the audience knows what they
+mean.  I never did get Billy's through my head."
+
+Lydia laughed.  "We just do it to be smart!  But I chose this one.
+It's one John Levine gave me years ago.  I thought it was a good one
+for young Americans--Love of Country leads them."
+
+"Indeed it is.  Especially with all the foreign children in the class.
+I'll have to tell Billy that.  He's doing fine in his law but his
+father's broken-hearted over his giving up farming."
+
+"I'll bet he goes back to it.  He's a born farmer," said Lydia.
+
+Late in March the valedictorian and salutatorian of the class were
+chosen.  The custom was for the teachers to select the ten names that
+had stood highest for scholarship during the entire four years and to
+submit these to the pupils of the class, who by popular vote elected
+from these the valedictorian and the salutatorian.
+
+To her joy and surprise Lydia's was one of the ten names.  So were
+Olga's and Kent's.
+
+"Olga and Kent will get it," Lydia told Amos and Lizzie.  "I'm going to
+vote for them myself.  All the boys are crazy about Olga and all the
+girls are crazy about Kent."
+
+The day on which the election took place was cold and rainy.  Amos
+plodding home for supper was astonished to see Lydia flying toward him
+through the mud a full quarter of a mile from home.
+
+"Daddy, they elected me valedictorian!  They did!  They did!"
+
+Amos dropped his dinner pail.  "You don't mean it!  How did it happen!
+I never thought of such a thing."  He was as excited as Lydia.
+
+She picked up his pail and clung to his arm as they started home.
+
+"I don't know how it happened.  They just all seemed to take it for
+granted.  No one was surprised but me.  Olga got four votes and Mamie
+Aldrich ten and I got sixty-six!  Daddy!  And Mamie wasn't cross but
+Olga was.  Oh, isn't it wonderful!"
+
+"Valedictorian!  My little Lydia!  Scholarship and popular vote!  I
+wish your mother was here.  What does Lizzie say?"
+
+Lydia giggled.  "I left Lizzie carrying on an imaginary conversation
+with Elviry Marshall, after she'd cried over me for half an hour.  And,
+Daddy, nobody was surprised but me!  Not the teachers or anybody!"
+
+"Thank God, there's some democracy left in the world," said Amos.
+"Evidently those youngsters voted without prejudice.  They can give us
+elders a few points.  Lord, Lydia! and folks have been looking down on
+us because we were poor and I'm little better than a day laborer.  I'll
+write to Levine tonight.  He'll have to be here for the exercises."
+
+"And Kent is salutatorian.  He won by just two votes.  I've got to
+begin to plan about my dress."
+
+"Now, I'm going to buy that dress, Lydia, if I have to borrow money.
+You aren't going to begin any talk about earning it."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Lydia, hastily.  "You won't have to borrow.
+White goods is always cheap and I'll get it right away so I can put
+lots of hard work on it."
+
+"What's your speech going to be about?" asked Amos, as they turned in
+the gate.
+
+"I haven't had time to think about that.  I'll plan it all out while
+I'm sewing.  I must make a V neck so I can wear the dress without the
+collar to the Senior Ball."
+
+Lizzie was waiting supper for them and poured the tea into the sugar
+bowl as she described to Amos the agonies of mind Elviry Marshall would
+endure on hearing the news.  Ma Norton came over during the evening to
+exchange a setting of eggs but wouldn't sit down after Amos had
+forestalled Lizzie in telling of Lydia's honor.  She said she couldn't
+wait to get home to tell Pa and Billy.
+
+Billy did not congratulate Lydia.  He passed her just as he had during
+all the months, with a curt little "Hello."  To tell the truth Lydia
+was heartily ashamed of herself for her shabby reception of Billy's
+plea.  Not that she had softened toward him!  But she knew she had been
+unkind and she missed the desultory companionship she had had with
+Billy.
+
+The preparation of the dress went on amazingly well.  The speech making
+was less simple.  As was customary, Lydia chose the class motto for her
+subject and sweated inordinately to find something to say.  She
+complained bitterly to Miss Towne and Amos because during the four
+years at High School nothing at all was taught about love of country,
+or patriotism, or anything that would make the motto suggestive.
+
+"How about your one term of Civil Government?" asked Miss Towne.
+
+"Oh, I was a freshman then and I've forgotten it all,--except the
+preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."
+
+Lydia stopped thoughtfully.
+
+Amos answered her plaint indignantly.  "Well, for heaven's sake!  And
+you a descendant of the Puritans!  Lord, what's become of the old
+stock!  No, I won't help you at all.  Think it out for yourself."
+
+And think it out Lydia did, sitting on the front steps with her sewing
+and listening to the sighing of the pine by the gate.
+
+Spring flew by like the wind, and June came.  There was but one flaw in
+Lydia's happiness.  Nobody asked her to attend the Senior Ball that was
+to take place on Graduation night.  To be sure, it was not an
+invitation affair.  The class was supposed to attend in a body but
+there was, nevertheless, the usual two-ing and only a very few of the
+girls who had no invitation from boys would go.  Lydia, herself, would
+have cut off her hand rather than appear at her own Senior Ball without
+a young man.
+
+She had pinned some faith to Kent, until she had heard that Margery was
+to be home in time for the graduating exercises.  As June came on and
+the tenth drew near, a little forlorn sense of the unfairness of things
+began to obscure Lydia's pride and joy in her honor.  On the ninth, the
+last rehearsal of the speech had been made; the dress was finished and
+hung resplendent in the closet; Amos himself had taken Lydia into town
+and bought her white slippers and stockings, taking care to inform the
+street-car conductor and the shoe clerk carelessly the wherefore and
+why of his mission.
+
+And Lydia knew that none of her classmates was going to ask her to the
+ball.  "They think they've done enough in giving me the valedictory,"
+she thought.  "As if I wouldn't exchange that in a minute for a sure
+enough invitation."
+
+Mortified and unhappy, she avoided her mates during the last week of
+school, fearing the inevitable question, "Who's going to take you, Lyd?"
+
+The tenth dawned, a lovely June day.  Amos had half a day off and was
+up at daylight, whistling in the garden.  The exercises began at ten
+and by half past eight, Lydia was buttoned into her pretty little
+organdy, Lizzie was puffing in her black alpaca and Amos was standing
+about in his black Sunday suit which dated back to his early married
+days.  By nine-thirty they had reached the Methodist church and Amos
+and Lizzie were established in the middle of the front row of the
+balcony while Lydia was shivering with fright in the choir-room where
+the class was gathered.
+
+Somebody began to play the organ and somebody else who looked like Miss
+Towne shoved Lydia toward the door and she led the long line of her
+mates into the front pews.  The same minister who had buried little
+Patience, prayed and a quartette sang.  A college professor spoke at
+length, then Kent appeared on the platform.
+
+Good old Kent, even if he wouldn't take Lydia to parties!  Kent, with
+his black eyes and hair, his ruddy skin and broad shoulders, was good
+to look on and was giving his speech easily and well.  Lydia had heard
+it a dozen times in rehearsal but now not a word Kent said was
+intelligible to her.  She was seeing him in a red bathing suit as he
+hung Florence Dombey from a yard arm of the willow.  She was hearing
+him as he knelt in the snow with an arm about her shoulders, "I'm so
+doggone sorry for you, Lydia."  What a dear he had been!  Now it all
+was different.  They were grown up.  This day marked their growing up
+and Kent didn't want to take her to parties.
+
+Kent bowed and took his seat.  The quartette sang and somebody prodded
+Lydia smartly in the back.  She made her way up to the platform and
+began to speak automatically.
+
+It was a very young and girlish speech.  It was delivered with
+tremendous sincerity.  Yet it did not matter much what she said, for
+what counted was that Lydia's contralto voice was very young and rich,
+that her golden hair was like a nimbus about her head, that her lips
+were red and sweet, that her cheeks were vivid and that her eyes were
+very blue, very innocent and clear.
+
+Amos with tight clenched fists and Lizzie with her lips a thin seam of
+nervous compression, were swelled with vanity and torn with fear lest
+she forget her lines.
+
+But John Levine, who had dashed in late and stood unnoticed in the
+crowd under the gallery listened intently, while he yearned over
+Lydia's immature beauty like a mother.
+
+"And so," she ended, "when we say good-by, you all must remember that
+we go out into the world resolved to live up to our motto.  That we
+believe with our forefathers that governments derive their just powers
+from the consent of the governed.  That all men are endowed by their
+Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty
+and the pursuit of happiness.  And that because the New England people
+in the Middle West are far from the cradle of liberty where these ideas
+were born, living among foreigners it behooves the members of our class
+to carry our motto into their daily life.  Love of country leads us and
+so farewell!"
+
+It was a foolish, sentimental little speech with one or two real
+thoughts in it and John Levine smiled even while the tears filled his
+eyes.  He told himself that no one, least of all probably Lydia
+herself, realized the cynical application of the class motto to Lake
+City conditions.
+
+The diplomas were distributed.  The great morning was over.  After the
+congratulations and the handshaking, Lydia found herself with her
+father, Lizzie, Levine and Ma Norton on the way to the trolley.  Lydia
+walked between her father and John.
+
+"You'll come out to dinner, Mr. Levine," asked Lydia.
+
+"No, ma'am," replied the Congressman.  "I return to Washington on the
+12:30 train, which gives me just time to see you to the trolley."
+
+"Why, what's the matter?" asked Amos.
+
+"We vote on the Levine bill, the morning I get back to Washington.  I
+just ran out to see young Lydia graduate."
+
+Amos groaned, "John, you're a fool!"
+
+Levine laughed.  "Lydia, am I a fool?"  He looked down at the flushed
+face above the dainty organdy.
+
+"No," she answered, giving him a swift look.  "You're a goose and a
+lamb."
+
+"So!  You see you don't understand me, Amos," said John, triumphantly
+as he helped Lydia aboard the street-car.  "Good-by, young Lydia.  I'll
+be home in a week or so."
+
+And so the great event ended.  After dinner Amos rushed back to the
+factory, Lydia hung the graduation gown away in her closet and she and
+Adam spent the afternoon on the lake shore, where the delicate splendor
+and perfume of June endeavored in vain to prove to Lydia that the
+Senior Ball was of no consequence.
+
+She was silent at supper, while Amos and Lizzie went over the details
+of the morning again.  After the dishes were washed she sat on the
+steps in the dusk with Adam's head in her lap when a carriage rolled up
+to the gate.  A man came swiftly up the path.  As he entered the stream
+of lamplight from the door Lydia with a gasp recognized Billy Norton.
+Billy, wearing a dress suit and carrying a bouquet of flowers!
+
+"Good evening, Lydia," he said calmly.  "Will you go to the Senior Ball
+with me?"
+
+Lydia was too much overcome for speech.  She never before had seen a
+man in a dress suit!  It made of Billy a man of the world.  Where was
+the country boy she had snubbed?
+
+"Here are some flowers I hope you'll wear," Billy went on, formally.
+"Would you mind hurrying?  It's pretty late."
+
+"Oh, Billy!" breathed Lydia, at last.  "Aren't you an angel!"
+
+She jumped to her feet and rushed through the house into her room,
+leaving Billy to explain to her father and Lizzie.  In half an hour the
+two were seated in the carriage, an actual, party-going, city hack, and
+bumping gaily on the way to the Ball.
+
+In her gratitude and delight, Lydia would have apologized to Billy for
+her last summer's rudeness, but Billy gave her no opportunity.  He
+mentioned casually that he had been up on the reservation, for a week,
+returning only that afternoon so that he had missed her graduation
+exercises.  They chatted quite formally until they reached Odd Fellows'
+Hall, where the dancing had already begun.
+
+Lydia's first dancing party!  Lydia's first man escort and he wearing a
+dress suit and there were only two others in the Hall!  Who would
+attempt to describe the joy of that evening?  Who would have recognized
+Billy, the farmer, in the cool blond person who calmly appropriated
+Lydia's card, taking half the dances for himself and parceling out the
+rest grudgingly and discriminatingly.  Kent was allowed two dances.  He
+was the least bit apologetic but Lydia in a daze of bliss was
+nonchalant and more or less uninterested in Kent's surprise at seeing
+her at a dance.
+
+For three hours, Lydia spun through a golden haze of melody and rhythm.
+Into three hours she crammed all the joy, all the thrill, that she had
+dreamed of through her lonely girlhood.  At half after eleven she was
+waltzing with Billy.
+
+"We must leave now, Lydia," he said.  "I promised your father I'd have
+you home by midnight."
+
+"Oh, Billy!  Just one more two step and one more waltz," pleaded Lydia.
+
+"Nope," he said, smiling down into her wistful eyes.  "I want to get a
+stand-in with your Dad because I want to take you to more parties."
+
+"Oh, Billy!  Do you!" breathed Lydia.  "Well, I don't think there's any
+one in the world has nicer things happen to them than I do!  Oh, Billy,
+just this waltz!"
+
+It would have taken a harder heart than Billy's to resist this.  He
+slipped his arm about her and they swung out on the floor to the
+strains of The Blue Danube, than which no lovelier waltz has ever been
+written.
+
+They did not speak.  Billy, holding the slender, unformed figure gently
+against his breast, looked down at the golden head with an expression
+of utter tenderness in his eyes, of deep resolve on his lips.
+
+At the end, Lydia looked up with a wondering smile.  "I didn't know any
+one could be so perfectly happy, Billy.  I shall always remember that
+of you--you gave me my happiest moment."
+
+On the way home in the bumping hack, Billy seemed to relax.  "Well, did
+I give you a good time, Miss, or didn't I?  Could Kent or Gustus have
+done better?"
+
+"Oh, they!" cried Lydia indignantly.  "But, Billy, I didn't know you
+could dance."
+
+"I couldn't, but I've been taking lessons all winter.  I'm not going to
+give a girl a chance twice to call me down the way you did last summer.
+Of course, this is just a second-hand dress suit, but I think it looks
+all right, don't you?"
+
+"Billy," said Lydia, "last summer I was just a silly little girl.  Now,
+I'm grown up.  You were the _swellest_ person at the ball to-night.
+You just wait till I tell your mother about it."
+
+Billy went up the path with Lydia to the steps and held her hand a
+moment in silence after he said, "It's a wonderful night!"
+
+A wonderful night, indeed!  The moon hung low over the lake and the
+fragrance of late lilac and of linden blooms enveloped them.  Youth and
+June-moonlight and silence!  A wonderful night indeed!
+
+"You are very sweet, Lydia," whispered the young man.  He laid his
+cheek for a moment against her hand, then turned quickly away.
+
+Lydia watched the carriage drive off, stood for a moment trying to
+impress forever on her mind the look and odor of the night, then with a
+tremulous sigh, she went indoors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE INDIAN CELEBRATION
+
+
+"The oak, the maple, the birch, I love them all, but nothing is so dear
+to the pine as the pine."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia was tired the day after the party, tired and moody.  After she
+had told Lizzie and Ma Norton all about the evening, she spent the rest
+of the day lying on the lake shore, with a book but not reading.  Late
+in the afternoon she went into the house and took Florence Dombey from
+her accustomed seat in a corner of the living-room.
+
+For a long time she sat with Florence Dombey in her arms, looking from
+the hectic china face to the scintillating turquoise of the lake and
+listening to the hushed whispering of the pine.  Finally with Adam
+lumbering jealously after her, she climbed the narrow stairs into the
+attic.
+
+Back under the eaves stood a packing box into which Lydia never had
+looked.  It contained all of little Patience's belongings.  Holding
+Florence Dombey in one arm, she lifted the lid of the box, catching her
+breath a little as she glimpsed the cigar box furniture and a folded
+little white dress.  Very carefully she laid Florence Dombey beside the
+furniture, leaned over and kissed her china lips and closed down the
+lid of the box.  Then of a sudden she dropped to the floor with her
+head against the box and sobbed disconsolately.  Adam gave a howl and
+crowded into her lap and Lydia hugged him but wept on.
+
+The late afternoon sun sifted through the dusty attic window on her
+yellow head.  Somewhere near the window a robin began to trill his
+vesper song.  Over and over he sang it until at last Lydia heard and
+raised her head.  Suddenly she smiled.
+
+"There, Adam," she said, "now I'm really grown up and I feel better.
+Let's go meet Dad."
+
+It was three or four days later that news came that the Levine bill had
+passed.  It was a compromise bill as John had intimated it would be to
+the half breeds in the woods.  Only the mixed bloods could sell their
+lands.  Nevertheless there was great rejoicing in Lake City.  Plans
+were begun immediately for a Fourth of July celebration upon the
+reservation.  Kent to his lasting regret missed the celebration.
+Immediately after school closed he had gone into Levine's office and
+had been sent to inspect Levine's holdings in the northern part of the
+State.
+
+Levine returned the last week in June and took charge of the
+preparations.  Amos, who never had been on the reservation, planned to
+go and Levine rented an automobile and invited Lydia, Amos, Billy
+Norton and Lizzie to accompany him.
+
+It rained on the third of July, but the fourth dawned clear and hot.
+Lydia really saw the dawn for she and Lizzie had undertaken to provide
+the picnic lunch and supper for the party of five and they both were
+busy in the kitchen at sunrise.  At eight o'clock the automobile was at
+the door.
+
+John drove the car himself and ordered Lydia in beside him.  The rest
+packed into the tonneau with the baskets.  It seemed as if all Lake
+City were headed for the reservation, for Levine's automobile was one
+of a huge line of vehicles of every type moving north as rapidly as the
+muddy road and the character of the motive power would permit.  As they
+neared the reservation, about eleven, they began to overtake parties of
+young men who had walked the twenty miles.
+
+They passed the Last Chance, which was gaily hung with flags.  Its yard
+was packed with vehicles.  Its bar was running wide open.  They swung
+on up the black road into the reservation, around a long hill, through
+a short bit of wood to the edge of a great meadow where John halted the
+car.
+
+On all sides but one were pine woods.  The one side was bordered by a
+little lake, motionless under the July sun.  On the edge of the pines
+were set dozens of tents and birch-bark wick-i-ups.  In the center of
+the meadow was a huge flagpole from which drooped the Stars and
+Stripes.  Near by was a grandstand and a merry-go-round and everywhere
+were hawkers' booths.
+
+Already the meadow was liberally dotted with sight-seers of whom there
+seemed to be as many Indians as whites.  The mechanical piano in
+connection with the merry-go-round shrilled above the calls of vendors.
+Overhead in the brazen blue of the sky, buzzards sailed lazily watching.
+
+"Isn't it great!" cried Lydia.  "What do we do first?"
+
+"Well," said Levine, "I'm free until three o'clock, when the speeches
+begin.  There'll be all sorts of Indian games going until then."
+
+"You folks go on," said Lizzie.  "I'm going to sit right here.  I never
+was so comfortable in my life.  This may be my only chance to see the
+world from an automobile and I don't calculate to lose a minute.  I can
+see all I want from right here."
+
+The others laughed.  "I don't blame you, Liz," said Amos.  "I feel a
+good deal that way, myself.  What's the crowd round the flagpole, John?"
+
+"Let's go see," answered Levine.
+
+"How did you get the Indians to come, Mr. Levine?" asked Billy.
+
+"By offering 'em all the food they could eat.  The majority of them
+haven't any idea what it's all about.  But they're just like white
+folks.  They like a party.  Don't get crowded too close to any of them,
+Lydia.  They're a dirty lot, poor devils."
+
+The crowd about the flagpole proved to be watching an Indian gambling
+game.  In another spot, a pipe of peace ceremony was taking place.  The
+shooting galleries were crowded.  Along the lake shore a yelling
+audience watched birch canoe races.  The merry-go-round held as many
+squaws and papooses and stolid bucks as it did whites.
+
+The four returned to the automobile for lunch hot and muddy but well
+saturated with the subtle sense of expectation and excitement that was
+in the air.
+
+"This is just a celebration and nothing else, John, isn't it?" asked
+Amos as he bit into a sandwich.
+
+"That's all," replied Levine.  "We thought it was a good way to jolly
+the Indians.  At the same time it gave folks a reason for coming up
+here and seeing what we were fighting for and, last and not least, it
+was the Indian Agent's chance to come gracefully over on our side."
+
+"Did he?" asked Lydia.
+
+"He did.  He's done more of the actual work of getting the celebration
+going than I have."
+
+"I wonder why?" asked Billy, suddenly.
+
+"All there is left for him to do," said Levine.  "Lydia, before the
+speeches begin, go up in the pines and choose your tract.  I'll buy it
+for you."
+
+Lydia glanced at Billy.  He was thinner this summer than she had ever
+seen him.  He was looking at her with his deep set gray eyes a little
+more somber, she thought, than the occasion warranted.  Nevertheless
+she stirred uneasily.
+
+"I don't want any Indian lands," she said.  "I'd always see Charlie
+Jackson in them."
+
+"The whole thing's wrong," muttered Billy.
+
+Levine gave him a quick look, then smiled a little cynically.  "You'd
+better go along with Lydia and take a look at the pines," he suggested.
+"Amos, I've already got your tract picked out.  It's ten miles from
+here so you can't see it to-day.  Come over to the speakers' stand and
+help me get things arranged."
+
+"I'd like to look at the pines again, anyhow," said Lydia.  "Come
+along, Billy."
+
+Lydia was wearing the corduroy outing suit of the year before and was
+looking extremely well.  Billy, in an ordinary business suit, was not
+the man of the world of Graduation night, yet there was a new maturity
+in his eyes and the set of his jaw that Lydia liked without really
+observing it.  Old Lizzie watched the two as they climbed the slope to
+the woods.  Billy strode along with the slack, irregular gait of the
+farmer.  Lydia sprang over the ground with quick, easy step.
+
+"Billy's a man grown," Lizzie said to herself, "and he's a nice fellow,
+but he don't tug at my old heart strings like Kent does--drat Kent,
+anyhow!"  She settled herself as conspicuously as possible in the
+automobile.  "If Elviry Marshall would pass now, I'd be perfectly
+happy," she murmured.
+
+Billy and Lydia entered the woods in silence and followed a sun-flecked
+aisle until the sound of the celebration was muffled save for the
+shrill notes of the mechanical piano, which had but two tunes, "Under
+the Bamboo Tree" and the "Miserere."
+
+"I hate to think of it all divided into farms and the pines cut down,"
+said Lydia.
+
+Billy leaned against one of the great tree trunks and stared
+thoughtfully about him.
+
+"I'm all mixed up, Lydia," he said.  "It's all wrong.  I know the
+things Levine and the rest are doing to get this land are wrong, and
+yet I don't see how they can be stopped."
+
+"Well," Lydia fanned herself with her hat, thoughtfully, "for years
+people have been telling me awful things Mr. Levine's done to Indians
+and I worried and worried over it.  And finally, I decided to take Mr.
+Levine for the dear side he shows me and to stop thinking about the
+Indians."
+
+"You can stop thinking, perhaps," said the young man, "but you can't
+stop this situation up here from having an influence on your life.
+Everybody in Lake City must be directly or indirectly affected by the
+reservation.  Everybody, from the legislators to the grocery keepers,
+has been grafting on the Indians.  Your own father says the thing
+that's kept him going for years was the hope of Indian lands.  Margery
+Marshall's clothed with Indian money."
+
+"And how about the influence on you, Billy?" asked Lydia with a keen
+look into the young fellow's rugged face.
+
+"I'm in the process of hating myself," replied Billy, honestly.  "I
+came up here last month to see how bad off the Indians were.  And I saw
+the poor starving, diseased brutes and I cursed my white breed.  And
+yet, Lyd, I saw a tract of pine up in the middle of the reservation
+that I'd sell my soul to own!  It's on a rise of ground, with a lake on
+one edge, and the soil is marvelous, and it belongs to a full-blood."
+
+There was understanding in Lydia's eyes.  "Oh, the pines are
+wonderful," she exclaimed.  "If one could only keep them, forever!  And
+I suppose that's the way the Indians feel about them too!"
+
+"It's all wrong," muttered Billy.  "It's all wrong, and yet," more
+firmly, "the reservation is doomed and if we don't take some of it,
+Lydia, we'll not be helping the Indians--but just being foolish."
+
+Lydia nodded.  A hot breeze drifted through the woods and the pines
+sighed deeply.
+
+"To have it and hold it for your children's children," exclaimed Lydia,
+passionately.  "You and yours to live on it forever.  And yet, I'd see
+a dead Indian baby and starving squaws behind every tree, I know I
+would."
+
+"I tell you what I'm going to do," said Billy, doggedly.  "I'm going to
+get hold of that tract.  I'm not going to deceive myself that it's all
+anything but a rotten, thieving game we whites are playing, but I'm
+going to do it, anyhow."
+
+"I'd like to myself," Lydia still had the look of understanding, "but
+I'm afraid to!  I'd be haunted by Charlie Jackson's eyes."
+
+"I'm going to get that tract.  I'll pay for it, somehow, and I'll go on
+doing what I can to see that the Indians get what's left of a decent
+deal."
+
+Again the two listened to the wind in the pines, then Lydia said, "We
+must get back for the speeches."
+
+Billy started back, obediently.
+
+"We're grown up, aren't we, Billy?" sighed Lydia.  "We've got to decide
+what we're going to do and be, and I hate to think about it.  I hate
+important decisions.  Seems as though I'd been dogged by 'em all my
+life."
+
+"If I had my way," cried Billy, unexpectedly, "you never should quite
+grow up.  You'd always be the dear little yellow-haired girl that
+tramped her legs off to earn my miserable old school books.  And that's
+what you always will be to me--the oldest and youngest little girl!
+And whether you like me or not, I'll tell you you're not going to have
+any worries that I can help you ward off."
+
+They were emerging into the meadow and Lydia laughed up at him
+mischievously, "I've always thought I overpaid for those school books.
+They were fearfully used up.  Oh, the speeches have begun," and Billy
+was hard put to it to keep close to her as she rushed toward the
+speakers' stand.
+
+Levine had just finished his speech when Billy and Lydia got within
+hearing, and he introduced State Senator James Farwell as the chief
+speaker of the day.  Farwell had considerable history to cover in his
+speech.  He began with the Magna Charta and worked by elaborate stages
+through the French Revolution, the conquest of India, the death of
+Warren Hastings, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution and
+the Civil War to Lincoln's Gettysburg speech.
+
+His audience, standing in the burning sun, was restless.  The Indians,
+understanding little that was said, were motionless, but the whites
+drifted about, talked in undertones and applauded only when as a
+fitting peak to all the efforts of the ages toward freedom, Farwell
+placed the present freeing of the Indians from the reservation.
+
+"The great fool!" said Billy to Lydia, as Farwell finally began to bow
+himself off the platform.
+
+Levine rose and began, "Ladies and gentlemen, this ends our program.
+We thank--"
+
+He was interrupted here by applause from the Indians.  Looking round he
+saw Charlie Jackson leading forward old Chief Wolf.
+
+"Chief Wolf wants to say a few words," cried Charlie.
+
+"The program is closed," called Levine loudly.
+
+There was a threat in Charlie's voice.  "He is going to speak!"  And
+there was a threat in the Indian voices that answered from the
+audience, "Let speak!  Let speak."
+
+Levine conferred hastily with Farwell and the Indian Agent, then the
+three with manifest reluctance--stood back and Charlie led the old
+Indian to the foot of the platform.
+
+Old Wolf was half blind with trachoma.  He was emaciated with sickness
+and slow starvation.  Nevertheless, clad in the beaded buckskin and
+eagle feathers of his youth, with his hawk face held high, he was a
+heroic figure of a man.
+
+He held up his right hand and began to speak in a trembling old bass,
+Charlie's young tenor translating sentence by sentence.  With the first
+word, the audience became motionless and silent.
+
+"I come from the wick-i-ups of my fathers to say one last word to the
+whites.  I am an old, old man.  The last winter was bitter hard and I
+may never see another July sun.  I have lived too long.  I have seen my
+race change from young men strong and daring as eagles, as thrifty and
+fat as brown bears, to feeble yellow wolves fit only to lap the carrion
+thrown them by the whites, and to lie in the sun and die.
+
+"And I say to you whites, you have done this.  You have moved us on and
+on, promising always that each resting place shall be ours forever.
+You swore by your God, in solemn council, that we could keep this
+reservation forever.  With room for all the peoples of the world here,
+you could not find room for the Indian.  You are a race of liars.  You
+are a race of thieves.  You have debauched our young men with your
+women.  You have ruined our daughters with your men.  You have taken
+our money.  And now you are entering our last home with the hand of
+desolation.  When the enemy enters the abiding place, the dweller is
+doomed.  But I place the curse of the Indian Spirit on you and the land
+you are stealing.  Some day it will be done to you as you have done to
+us.  Some day--"
+
+Levine stepped forward.  "Jackson, take that Indian away," he commanded.
+
+An angry murmur came from the Indians in the audience.  A murmur that
+as Levine laid hold of old Wolf's arm, grew to strange calls.  There
+was a surging movement toward the platform.  Billy jumped on a box that
+he had found for a seat for Lydia.
+
+"Charlie!" he roared, "Charlie!  Remember there are women and children
+in this crowd."
+
+"What do I care for your women and children?" shouted Charlie.
+
+Then his glance fell on Lydia's golden head.  She waved her hand to him
+beseechingly.  Charlie hesitated for a moment, then spoke loudly in
+Indian to the crowd, and led old Wolf from the platform.  The movement
+forward of the Indians ceased.  The whites moved out of the crowd and
+for a moment there was a complete segregation of Indians and whites.
+
+Then the mechanical piano which had stopped during the speech-making
+suddenly started up with a loud twang of "Under the Bamboo Tree."  Two
+Indian boys laughed and started on a run for the merry-go-round and the
+crowd followed after.
+
+Billy got down from his box with a sigh of relief.  "That might have
+been an ugly moment," he said, "if Charlie hadn't seen you."
+
+"The poor things!  Oh, Billy, the poor, poor things!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Billy nodded.  "It's all wrong."
+
+The noise of hawkers began again, but something had gone out of the
+celebration.  The Indians stood about in groups, talking, Charlie and
+Chief Wolf the center always of the largest group.
+
+Amos and John joined Billy and Lydia at the machine.  "The war dancing
+begins at sundown," said Levine.  "I told the Indian Agent 'twas a risk
+to let them go on, after this episode.  But he laughs at me.  I don't
+like the look of things, though."
+
+"They aren't armed?" asked Amos.
+
+"No, but've got those pesky bows and arrows we were having them show
+off with.  I don't know but what I'd better get you folks home."
+
+"Shucks," said Amos, "I wouldn't let the Indians think they could scare
+us.  What could they do, poor sickly devils, anyhow?"
+
+"That's right," said Billy.  "There's nothing can happen.  I don't
+think Charlie Jackson would stand for any violence."
+
+"I don't know about that," Levine spoke thoughtfully.  "He's left Doc
+Fulton and is living on the reservation again.  They always revert."
+
+"Listen!  Listen!" cried Lydia,
+
+There was a red glow behind the clouds low in the west.  From the foot
+of the flagpole came a peculiar beat of drum.  A white can beat a drum
+to carry one through a Gettysburg.  An Indian can beat a drum to carry
+one's soul back to the sacrifice of blood upon a stony altar.  This
+drum beat "magicked" Lydia and Billy.  It was more than a tocsin, more
+than a dance rhythm, more than the spring call.  They hurried to the
+roped-off circle round the flagpole, followed by John and Amos.
+
+An Indian in beaded buckskin squatted by the pole, beating a drum.
+Above him the flag stirred lazily.  The west was crimson.  The scent of
+sweet grass was heavy.  There was a breathless interval while the drum
+seemed to urge Lydia's soul from her body.
+
+Then there came the cry again followed by a wordless chant.  Into the
+ring, in all the multicolored glory of beads and paint, swung a dozen
+moccasined braves.  They moved in a step impossible to describe,--a
+step grave, rhythmic, lilting, now slow, three beats to a step, now
+swift, three steps to a beat.  Old chiefs, half blind with trachoma,
+scarred with scrofula and decrepit with starvation; young bucks, fresh
+and still strong, danced side by side, turned by the alchemy of the
+drum into like things, young and vivid as dawn.
+
+At intervals, at the bidding of the braves, squaws arose and moved
+sedately into the circle.  In their dark dresses they moved about the
+outer edge of the circle with a side step that scarcely ruffled their
+skirts.  The west lost its glow.  Fires flashed here and there in the
+meadow.  In the flickering, changing lights the dance went on and on.
+The flag fitfully revealed itself above the melting, gliding,
+opalescent group about the pole, that by degrees was growing larger as
+was the constant rim of somber squaws, with their dumb faces
+Sphinx-like in the half light.
+
+Lydia shivered with excitement.  Billy pulled her arm through his.
+
+"I don't like this," he muttered.
+
+"What's the matter?" exclaimed Lydia.  "Do you think there's going to
+be trouble?"
+
+"I don't know.  It's just something in the air.  I think we'd better
+find the folks and get you and Lizzie out of this."
+
+"I don't believe they mean any harm," said Lydia.  "Lots of the whites
+started home before sunset, anyhow."
+
+"I wish you had," replied Billy.  "Gee, here it comes."
+
+The chant suddenly changed to a yell.  The drum beat quickened, and the
+great circle of dancing Indians broke and charged the crowd of whites.
+A number of them drew revolvers and began firing them into the air.
+Others drew taut the great bows they carried.  The whites plunged
+backward precipitately.
+
+Billy thrust Lydia behind him.  "Don't move, Lyd," he cried, pushing
+aside a threatening buck as he did so.
+
+"Kill 'em whites!" shrieked the squaws.
+
+"Run 'em whites off our reservation!" shouted half a dozen young bucks.
+
+Lydia was trembling but cool.  "Good for them!  Oh, Billy, good for
+them!" she exclaimed.
+
+He did not reply.  His great body circled about her, with shoulder and
+elbow buffeting off the surging crowd.  Thus far the whites had taken
+the proceedings as a joke.  Then a white woman screamed,--
+
+"Run!  It's a massacre!"
+
+"Massacre" is a horrifying word to use to whites in an Indian country.
+Men and women both took up the cry,--
+
+"It's a massacre!  Run!"
+
+And the great crowd bolted.
+
+Like pursuing wolves, the Indians followed, beating the laggards with
+their bows, shouting exultantly.  Billy caught Lydia round the waist
+and held her in front of him as well as he could, and for a few moments
+the rush of the mob carried them on.
+
+Then Lydia heard Billy's voice in her ear.  "If this isn't stopped, it
+_will_ be a massacre.  We've got to find Charles Jackson."
+
+"We may be killed trying to find him!" Lydia cried.
+
+"We've got to make a try for it, anyhow," replied Billy.  "Brace your
+shoulders back against my chest.  I'll try to stop."
+
+They succeeded in holding themselves steadily for a moment against the
+mob and in that moment, Billy caught a screaming squaw by the arm.
+
+"Susie, where's Charlie Jackson?"
+
+She jerked her thumb back toward the flag pole and twisted away.
+
+"All right!  Now we'll make for the pole, Lydia, get behind me and put
+your arms round my waist.  Hang on, for heaven's sake."
+
+Lydia did hang on for a few moments.  But the flight was now developing
+into a free for all fight.  And before she knew just how it happened,
+Lydia had fallen and feet surged over her.
+
+She buried her face in her arms.  It seemed an age to her before Billy
+had snatched her to her feet.  In reality she was not down for more
+than two minutes.  Billy swung her against his chest with one arm and
+swung out with his other, shouting at Indians and whites alike.
+
+"You damned beasts!  You dirty damned beasts."
+
+Lydia, bruised and shaken, clung to him breathlessly, then cried, "Go
+ahead, Billy!"
+
+He glanced down at her and saw a streak of blood on her forehead.  His
+face worked and he began to sob and curse like a madman.
+
+"They've hurt you, the hellhounds!  I'll kill somebody for this."
+
+Kicking, striking with his free arm, oaths rolling from his lips, he
+burst through the crowd and rushed Lydia to the free space about the
+flagpole where Charlie Jackson stood coolly watching the proceedings.
+
+Billy shook his fist under the Indian's nose.
+
+"Get down there and call the pack off or I'll brain you."
+
+Jackson shrugged his shoulders, calmly.  "Let 'em have their fun.  It's
+their last blowout.  I hope they do kill Levine and Marshall."
+
+Lydia pulled herself free of Billy.  Her voice was trembling, but she
+had not lost her head.
+
+"Call them off, Charlie.  It'll just mean trouble in the end for all of
+you if you don't."
+
+Charlie looked at Lydia closely and his voice changed as he said, "You
+got hurt, Lydia?  I'm sorry."
+
+"Sorry!  You damned brute!" raved Billy.  "I tell you, call off this
+row!"
+
+The two young men glared at each other.  Afterglow and firelight
+revealed a ferocity in Billy's face and a cool hatred in Charlie's that
+made Lydia gasp.  The shouting of the mob, the beating of the drum was
+receding toward the road.  The flag snapped in the night wind.
+
+Billy put his face closer to Charlie's.  The muscles of his jaw knotted
+and his hands clenched and unclenched.
+
+"Call it off!" he growled.
+
+Charlie returned Billy's stare for a long moment.  Then sullenly,
+slowly, he turned and threw out across the night a long, shrill cry.
+He gave it again and again.  At each repetition the noise of the mob
+grew less, and shortly panting, feverish-eyed bucks began to struggle
+into the light around the pole.
+
+Then, without a word, Billy led Lydia away.  The Indians passing them
+shook their bows at them but they were unmolested.
+
+"Can you walk, Lydia?  Do you think you're badly hurt?" asked Billy.
+
+"I'm not hurt except for this cut on my head.  And I guess I'm scared
+and bruised from being stepped on.  That's all."
+
+"All!  To think of me not scratched and you hurt!  Your father ought to
+horsewhip me!"
+
+"You saved me from being trampled to death!" cried Lydia, indignantly.
+"Oh there's the auto."
+
+There it was, indeed, with old Lizzie standing in the tonneau, wringing
+her hands, and Amos and Levine, dust covered and disheveled, guarding
+the car with clubs.
+
+They all shouted with relief when they saw the two.  Lydia by now had
+wiped the blood from her face.
+
+"Billy," cried Levine, "could you run the car and the two women down
+the road while Amos and I help the Agent get order here?  The worst
+seems to be over, for some reason."
+
+"Billy got Charlie Jackson to call the Indians in," said Lydia.
+
+"Good work!" exclaimed Amos.  "Are you both all right?"
+
+"Yes," answered Lydia.  "Go on!  Billy'll take care of us."
+
+"I'll wait for you at the willows, a mile below Last Chance," said
+Billy.
+
+"Land," said Lizzie, as the car swung through the hurrying whites, to
+the road.  "About one picnic a lifetime like this, would do me!"
+
+Billy was an indifferent chauffeur but he reached the willows without
+mishap.
+
+"Now," he said, "come out in front of the lamps, Lydia, till I see what
+happened to you."
+
+"For heaven's sake, did Lydia get hurt?" screamed Lizzie.
+
+"Don't fuss about me," said Lydia crossly, not offering to follow the
+other two out of the car.
+
+Billy turned, lifted her down bodily and led her around to the lamps,
+while he told Lizzie what had happened.
+
+The cut on the scalp was slight.  Billy washed it out with water from
+the brook back of the willows and Lizzie produced a clean pocket
+handkerchief with which to bind it.  Then they went back to the car and
+ate their belated supper.  After a time, Lizzie, who had the back seat
+to herself, began to snore comfortably.
+
+Little by little, the stars were blotted out by a thin film of clouds.
+Sitting under the willows with the murmur of the brook and the
+fragrance of marsh grass enveloping them, the two young people did not
+talk much.
+
+"Billy, were you scared?" asked Lydia.
+
+"I don't know.  I only know I went crazy when I saw you were hurt.
+God, Lydia--I couldn't stand that!"
+
+"Billy," whispered Lydia, "you're so good to me and I was so horrid to
+you once."
+
+Billy felt her fingers on his knee and instantly the thin little hand
+was enveloped in his warm fist.  "Do you take it all back, Lydia?"
+
+"Well, the horrid part of it, I do," she hedged.
+
+"That's all right," returned the young man.  "I'm willing to fight for
+the rest of it.  Don't try to pull your hand away, because I intend to
+hold it till the folks come.  You can't help yourself, so you have no
+responsibility in the matter."
+
+So for an hour longer they sat, watching the summer night and waiting.
+And sometimes it seemed to Lydia that they were a pioneer man and woman
+sitting in their prairie schooner watching for the Indians.  And
+sometimes it seemed to her that they were the last white man and woman,
+that civilization had died and the hordes were coming down upon them.
+
+Finally two dim figures approached.  "All right, Lydia?" asked Amos.
+
+"Oh, yes!  Yes!" she cried.  "Are either of you hurt?"
+
+"No," replied Levine, "but we stayed till I'd got my half-breeds
+distributed about to watch that none of the full bloods got out of the
+meadow."
+
+"Was any one hurt?" asked Billy.
+
+"Oh, two or three broken heads among both Indians and whites.  We got
+hold of Charlie Jackson about eleven and locked him up, then we felt
+secure."
+
+"You aren't going to hurt Charlie!" cried Lydia.
+
+"No, but we'll shut him up for a week or so," said Amos.  "Move over,
+Lizzie."
+
+"Goodness," exclaimed Lizzie, "I must have dozed off for a minute!"
+
+In the laughter that followed, Levine started the car homeward.
+
+During the trip, the story was told of Lydia's mishap, Billy and Lydia
+interpolating each other in the telling.  Amos shook hands with Billy
+silently when they had finished and Levine turned round from the wheel
+to say,
+
+"I'll not forget this night's work, Bill."
+
+They reached home at daylight.  The Celebration made table talk and
+newspaper space for several days.  No real attempt was made to punish
+the Indians.  For once, the whites, moved by a sense of tardy and
+inadequate justice, withheld their hands.
+
+Kent never ceased to mourn that he had missed the affair.  He confided
+the fact to Lydia one Sunday that he had told Levine of their
+eavesdropping on him in the woods.
+
+"What did he say?" asked Lydia, flushing.
+
+"Gave me this nice fat job," replied Kent.
+
+Lydia stared, then she sighed.  "Well, I don't understand men at all!"
+
+And Kent laughed.
+
+Lydia saw a good deal of Billy during the summer.  He never spoke of
+the accident to her at the Celebration, except to inquire about her
+bruises which troubled her for a week or so.  Lydia wondered if he was
+ashamed of his wild flame of anger and his tears.  She herself never
+thought of the episode without a thrill, as if she had been close for
+once to the primal impulses of life.
+
+Margery Marshall and Elviry went to Atlantic City and Newport this
+summer.  John Levine was sure to take supper at the cottage once or
+twice a week, but he was very busy with his political work and with the
+enormous sales of mixed-breed lands to the whites.
+
+It was just before college opened that Amos announced that he was going
+to buy the one hundred and twenty acres John had set aside for him.
+
+"How are you going to pay for it?" Lydia asked.
+
+"Don't you worry, I'll tend to that," replied Amos.
+
+Levine was taking supper with them.  "Better tell her all about it,
+Amos," he said.  "You know Lydia is our partner."
+
+"Well, she'll just worry," warned Amos.  "John's going to hold it for
+me, till I can get the pine cut off.  That'll pay for the land."
+
+"How much did you pay for it, Mr. Levine?" asked Lydia.
+
+Levine grinned.  "I forget!"
+
+Lydia's gaze was still the round, pellucid gaze of her childhood.  She
+sat now with her chin cupped in her palm, her blue eyes on Levine.  To
+the surprise of both the men, however, she said nothing.
+
+After the supper dishes were washed, and Amos was attending to the
+chickens, Lydia came slowly out to the front steps where Levine was
+sitting.  He reached up and catching her hand pulled her down beside
+him on the topmost step.  She leaned her head against his arm and they
+sat in silence, Lydia with her eyes on the dim outline of the pine by
+the gate.
+
+"Lydia," said John, finally, "how does the Great Search go on?  We
+haven't reported for a long time."
+
+"I don't think I make much headway," replied Lydia.  "The older I grow,
+the less I understand men and I've always felt as if, if there was a
+God, He was a man."
+
+"You mean male, rather than female," agreed John.
+
+"Lydia, dear, I wish you did have faith."
+
+"But do you believe, yourself?" urged Lydia.
+
+"Yes, I know that the soul can't die," said the man, quietly.  "And the
+thing that makes me surest is the feeling I have for you, I know that
+I'll have another chance."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Lydia wonderingly.
+
+"_That_, you'll never know," he replied.
+
+"Well, I know that you're a dear," said the young girl, unexpectedly,
+"no matter how you get your Indian lands.  And I love you to death."
+
+She patted his cheek caressingly, and John Levine smiled sadly to
+himself in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE HARVARD INSTRUCTOR
+
+
+"The saddest things that I have seen are the burned pine woods and the
+diseased Indians."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+The University campus was a huge square of green, elm dotted, that was
+bordered on one edge for a quarter of a mile by the lake.  The other
+three sides were enclosed by the college buildings, great Gothic piles
+of gray stone, ivy grown, with swallow haunted eaves.  One entered the
+campus through wide archways, that framed from the street ravishing
+views of lake and elm, with leisurely figures of seniors in cap and
+gown in the foreground.
+
+College life was not much unlike High School life for Lydia.  She of
+course missed the dormitory living which is what makes University
+existence unique.  The cottage was nearly three miles from the campus.
+Lydia took a street-car every morning, leaving the house with her
+father.  She was very timid at first: suffered agony when called on to
+recite: reached all her classes as early as possible and sat in a far
+corner to escape notice.  But gradually, among the six thousand
+students she began to lose her self-consciousness and to feel that,
+after all, she was only attending a larger High School.
+
+It was curious, it seemed to her, in how short a time the real High
+School dropped out of her life.  Miss Towne and the cooking teacher who
+had had so much to do with her adolescent development, became more or
+less dreamlike.  And though Lydia did try to call on Miss Towne at the
+High School, her days were very full and little by little she slipped
+away entirely from the old environment.
+
+Except for flying visits home, John Levine spent the year at
+Washington.  He was returned to Congress practically automatically, at
+the end of his term.  Kent throve mightily as a real estate man.  He
+dashed about in a little "one lung" car with all the importance of
+nineteen in business for the first time.  He continued to call on Lydia
+at irregular intervals in order to boast, she thought, of his real
+estate acumen and of his correspondence with Margery and Olga, both of
+whom were now at boarding-school.
+
+Lydia was taking a general course in college.  In a vague way, she was
+planning to become a teacher and partly because she had no aptitude for
+foreign languages, and partly because of the deep impression Miss
+Towne's little lecture on slang had made on her, she decided to teach
+English.  She therefore took not only the required course in Freshman
+Composition, but an elective in Shakespeare, and was herded with fifty
+others into the classroom of a young instructor fresh from Harvard.  He
+was a frail looking young man, smooth shaven and thin, with large,
+light brown eyes behind gold rimmed eyeglasses.
+
+Lydia was deeply impressed from the very first by the young man's
+culture.  He could quote Latin and Greek quite as freely as he could
+French and German and his ease in quoting the latter seemed as great as
+in quoting Palgrave's Lyrics, which Lydia was sure he could quote from
+cover to cover.
+
+If his manner was a trifle impatient and condescending, this only
+served to enhance his impressiveness.  And he knew his Shakespeare.
+Lydia entered under his guidance that ever new and ever old world of
+beauty that only the born Shakespeare lover discovers.
+
+The Christmas recess had come and gone before Lydia became vaguely
+conscious that young Professor Willis called on her always to recite,
+whether he did on any other girl in the class or not.  She did not know
+that from the first day she had entered his class the young professor
+had been conscious of the yellow head in the furthest corner of the
+classroom.  It was a nobly shaped head bound round with curly yellow
+braids above a slender face, red cheeked yet delicate.  He was
+conscious too of the home-made suit and the cheap shirtwaists, with the
+pathetic attempt at variety through different colored neckties.  Little
+by little he recognized that the bashful young person had a mental
+background not shared by her mates, and he wondered about her.
+
+It was early in January that he made an attempt to satisfy his
+curiosity.  The snowfall had been light so far and heavy winds had
+blown the lake clear of drifts.  Lydia often brought her skates to
+class with her and if the wind were favorable skated home after her
+last recitation.
+
+She had just fastened on her skates one day when a rather breathless
+voice behind her said,
+
+"Going for a skate, Miss Dudley?" and Professor Willis, skates over his
+shoulder, bore down on her.
+
+Lydia blushed vividly--"I--I often skate home.  I live three miles down
+the shore."
+
+"Rather thought I'd have a try myself, if you don't mind."
+
+"Heavens!" thought Lydia.  "I hope he won't come clear home with me?
+The house looks awful!"
+
+Willis fastened on his skates and stood up.  "Which way?" he asked.
+
+Lydia nodded homeward and started off silently, the Harvard man close
+beside her.
+
+"You enjoy your Shakespeare work, Miss Dudley?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes!" cried Lydia.  "That most of anything.  Don't you love to
+teach it?"
+
+"Er--in some ways!  I will admit that the co-educational end of it is
+very trying to an Eastern college man."
+
+This was such a surprising view to Lydia that she forgot to be bashful.
+"Don't you like girls, Professor Willis?" she asked.
+
+"Not in a boys' classroom--that is--at first the situation brought cold
+sweat to my face.  But now, I carry on the work to a great extent for
+you.  You are the only person with a background, don't you know."
+
+Lydia didn't know.  The Harvard man's voice, however, was entirely
+impersonal, so she ventured to explore.
+
+"What do you mean by background?"
+
+"If you wouldn't skate so outrageously fast," he panted, "I could tell
+you with more--more aplomb."
+
+"But," explained Lydia, "I have to skate fast.  There's always so much
+to be done and old Lizzie isn't well."
+
+She looked at the Shakespeare professor innocently.  He looked at his
+watch.
+
+"Dear me!" he said, "I must be back in the classroom in half an hour.
+Supposing we continue this conversation to-morrow, in your own home,
+Miss Dudley?  May I call to-morrow night?"
+
+"Why yes," replied Lydia, in utter embarrassment again, "if you really
+want to!  It's a dreadful trip,--to the end of the car line and half a
+mile along the road to a white cottage after that."
+
+"That's nothing," said the Harvard man, gravely.  "Till to-morrow night
+then," and lifting his cap, he skated back, leaving Lydia in a state of
+mind difficult to define.
+
+She told Lizzie and her father that evening.  Amos looked over his
+paper with a slight scowl.  "You're too young to have a college
+professor calling."
+
+"Well," cried Lydia, "you don't seem to realize how wonderful it is
+that he wants to take this awful trip out here, just to see _me_.  And
+don't let it worry you, Daddy!  He'll never want to come but once."
+She looked around the living-room disgustedly.
+
+Amos started to speak, looked at Lizzie, who shook her head, and
+subsided.  The older Lydia grew, the more helpless he felt in guiding
+her.  It seemed to him though that Patience would be pleased to have a
+professor calling on her daughter, and he let the matter go at that.
+
+The next day was Saturday, and Lydia started an attack on the
+living-room immediately after breakfast.  She re-oiled the floors.  She
+took down the curtains, washed and ironed them and put them up again.
+She blacked the base burner and gave the howling Adam a bath.  The old
+mahogany worried her, even after she had polished it and re-arranged it
+until the worst of the scratches were obscured.
+
+Her father's old wooden armchair, a solid mahogany that had belonged to
+his great-grandfather, she decided to varnish.  She gave it two heavy
+coats and set it close to the kitchen stove to dry.  By this time she
+was tired out.  She lay in the dusk on the old couch watching the red
+eyes of the base burner, when Billy came in.
+
+"Just stopped on my way home to see if you'd go skating to-night," he
+said.  "Tired out?  What've you been doing?"
+
+Lydia enumerated the day's activities ending with, "Professor Willis is
+coming to call this evening."
+
+Billy gave a low whistle.  "Of course, I knew they'd begin to take
+notice sooner or later.  But I don't see why you wanted to wear
+yourself out for a sissy like him."
+
+"He's not a sissy.  He's a gentleman," said Lydia, calmly.  She was
+still curled up on the couch and Billy could just distinguish her
+bright hair in the red glow from the stove.
+
+Billy was silent for a moment, then he said, "It's a shame you have to
+work so hard.  I think of you so often when I see other girls in their
+pretty clothes, gadding about!  Doggone it! and you're worth any ten of
+them.  If I had my way--"
+
+He paused and for a moment only the familiar booming of the ice
+disturbed the silence.
+
+"I don't mind the work so much as I do going without the pretty
+clothes," said Lydia.  "I suppose you'll think I'm awful silly," she
+suddenly sat up in her earnestness, "but when I get to thinking about
+how I'm growing up and that dresses never can mean to me when I'm old
+what they do now--oh, I can't explain to a man!  It's like Omar
+Khayyam--
+
+  "'Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the rose
+  That youth's sweet scented manuscript should close--'
+
+and my youth's going to close without the sweet scent of the rose."
+
+Billy made one great stride over to the couch and sitting down beside
+Lydia he took her thin, work hardened little hands in his.  "Lydia, no!
+You don't see yourself right!  All the dresses in the world couldn't
+make you sweeter or more fragrant to a fellow's heart than you are now.
+The only importance to the clothes is that you love them so.  Don't you
+see?"
+
+Lydia laughed uncertainly.  "I see that you're a dear old blarney,
+Billy.  And I know one thing I have got that not one girl in a thousand
+has and that is the friendship of some of the best men in the world.
+In lots of ways, I'm very lucky.  Honestly, I am!  Trot on home, Billy.
+I've got to get supper.  And I don't have to work so hard, remember
+that.  Half my work is in trying to fix up the house."
+
+Billy rose reluctantly.  "I'm leaving you some marshmallows," he said.
+"I hope if you offer Willis one, it'll choke him, or," as he opened the
+door, "maybe he'll break his leg or his neck on the way out," and he
+shut the door firmly behind him.
+
+Amos submitted with some grumbling to being relegated to the
+dining-room with Lizzie for the evening.  He complained somewhat
+bitterly, however, over the condition of his armchair which had refused
+to dry and was in a state of stickiness that defied description.
+
+Old Lizzie, who was almost as flushed and bright-eyed over the expected
+caller as Lydia, finally squelched Amos with the remark, "For the
+land's sake, Amos, you talk like an old man instead of a man still
+forty who ought to remember his own courting days!"
+
+Willis arrived, shortly after eight.  If the trip had been somewhat
+strenuous, he did not mention the fact.  He shook hands with Amos, who,
+always eager to meet new people, would have lingered.  But Lizzie
+called to him and he reluctantly withdrew.  Lydia established her guest
+with his back to the dining-room door and the evening began.
+
+The Harvard man was frankly curious.  This was his first experience
+west of New York and he was trying to classify his impressions.  The
+beauty of Lake City had intrigued him at first, he told Lydia, into
+believing that he was merely in a transplanted New England town.  "And
+you know there are plenty of New Englanders on the faculty and many of
+the people of Lake Shore Avenue are second and third generation New
+Englanders.  But the townspeople as a whole!"  He stopped with a groan.
+
+"What's the matter with them?" Lydia asked, a trifle belligerently.
+She was sitting on the couch, chin cupped in her hand, watching her
+caller so intently that she was forgetting to be bashful.
+
+"Oh, you know they're so exactly like my classes in
+Shakespeare--raw-minded, no background, and plenty of them are of New
+England descent!  I don't understand it.  It's New England without its
+ancient soul, your Middle West."
+
+"I don't know what you mean by background," said Lydia.
+
+"But, Miss Dudley, you have it!  Something, your reading or your
+environment has given you a mental referendum, as it were.  You get
+more out of your Shakespeare than most of your mates because you
+understand so many of his references.  You must have been a wide reader
+or your father and mother taught you well."
+
+"I--you've got the wrong impression about me," Lydia protested.  "I've
+read always and mostly good things, thanks to Mr. Levine, but so have
+many other people in Lake City."
+
+Professor Willis looked at Lydia thoughtfully.  "Levine?  I thought he
+was a cheap scamp."
+
+Lydia flushed.  "He's my best friend and a finely read man.  He's kept
+me supplied with books."
+
+"Finely read, on the one hand," exclaimed Willis, "and on the other
+robbing Indians.  How do you account for it?"
+
+Lydia did not stir.  She continued with her crystal gaze on this wise
+man from the East, struggling to get his viewpoint.  There flashed into
+her mind the thought that perhaps, when she knew him better, he could
+help her on the Indian question.
+
+"I can't account for it," she said.  "I wish I could.  Except for a
+French Canadian great-grandfather, Mr. Levine's a New Englander too."
+
+"New Englander!  Pshaw!  Outside of Lake Shore Avenue and the college
+there are no New Englanders here.  They are hollow mockeries, unless,"
+he stared at Lydia through his gold-rimmed glass, "unless you are a
+reversion to type, yourself."
+
+Lizzie spoke from the dining-room.  "The chocolate's all ready, Lydia."
+
+"Oh, I forgot," exclaimed Lydia, flying out of the room and returning
+with a tray of chocolate and cake.  "The cold walk must have made you
+hungry."
+
+Willis drew up to the table, and over his cup of chocolate remarked,
+"Ah--pardon me if I comment on the wonderful pieces of mahogany you
+have."
+
+Lydia set down her cup.  "Why, I hate it!" she cried.
+
+"Hate  it!  It's  priceless!  Family  pieces?  I thought so!  What
+delicious cake!  How kind of your mother!  I'd like to meet her, if I
+may."
+
+"I made the cake, Professor Willis.  My--my mother is not living."
+
+The Harvard man's stilted manner left him.  He set down his cup
+hastily.  "Oh, my dear!" he exclaimed.  "I was tactless!  Forgive me!"
+Again he looked about the room and back at Lydia's face above the
+meager dress fashioned the year before from a cheap remnant.  Could a
+mother's death, he wondered, have put the look into her eyes and lips
+he had often surprised there.  "I suppose," he said finally, "that one
+might explain you, eventually, if one had the privilege of knowing you
+long enough, I--"
+
+Adam chose this moment to yelp at the dining-room door which was barely
+ajar.
+
+"Adam, be quiet!" roared Amos.  "Liz, did you see my carpet slippers
+anywhere?" he added in a lower voice.
+
+"I brought you a book," said Willis.  "Browning's Dramatic Lyrics."
+
+"I'd like to read them," Lydia spoke eagerly, with one ear on the
+dining-room.
+
+Amos yawned loudly.  "Did you wind the clock, Lizzie?  No?  Well, I
+will!"  Another loud yawn and Amos was heard to begin on the mechanism
+of the huge old wall clock which wound with a sound like an
+old-fashioned chain pump.  Lydia set her teeth in misery.
+
+"Yes, you must add Browning to your background," said the Harvard man,
+appearing undisturbed by the sounds in the next room.  "Browning is
+difficult at times but--"  He was interrupted by a great clattering in
+the dining-room.
+
+"Lizzie!" roared Amos.  "Come here and pull this chair off of me.  The
+next time Lydia varnishes anything--"
+
+There was the sound of Lizzie pounding across the floor.  The
+dining-room door was banged and after that the murmur of Lizzie's voice
+and subdued roars from Amos.  Lydia looked at Willis in an agony of
+embarrassment.
+
+"Well," he said, rising, "it's quite a walk back to the trolley.
+Perhaps I'd better be going."
+
+Lydia rose with alacrity.  "I'm--I'm glad you like the mahogany," she
+said awkwardly.
+
+"Er--yes.  So am I," returned Willis, making for the door as Amos
+groaned again.  "Good night, Miss Dudley."
+
+"Good night," said Lydia, and closing the door with a gasp of relief
+she dashed for the dining-room.
+
+"Just when I'm trying to be refined and lady-like!" she wailed.  Then
+she stopped.
+
+"Lydia," roared Amos, "if you ever touch my chair again!  Look at my
+shirt and pants!"
+
+Lydia looked and from these to the chair, denuded of the two coats of
+varnish.  "But you knew it wasn't dry," she protested.
+
+"How could I remember?" cried Amos.  "I just sat down a minute to put
+on my slippers you'd hid."
+
+"I don't see why you couldn't have been quiet about it," Lydia half
+sobbed.  "We were having such a nice time and all of a sudden it
+sounded like an Irish wake out here.  It embarrassed Professor Willis
+so he went right home and I know he'll never come back."
+
+"I should hope he wouldn't," retorted Amos.  "Of course, what a college
+professor thinks is more important than my comfort.  Why, that varnish
+went through my shirt to my skin.  Liz, what are you laughing at?"
+
+Lizzie had suppressed her laughter till she was weak.  "At you, Amos!
+Till my dying day, I'll never forget how you looked prancing round the
+room with that chair glued to your back!"
+
+"Oh, Daddy!  It must have been funny!" cried Lydia, beginning to giggle.
+
+Amos looked uncertainly at his two women folk, and then his lips
+twisted and he laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.
+
+"Lydia!  Lydia!" he cried, "don't try to be elegant with any more of
+your callers!  It's too hard on your poor old father!"
+
+"I won't," replied Lydia.  "He likes the mahogany, anyway.  But he'll
+never come again," she added, with sudden gloom.  "Not that I care,
+stiff old Harvard thing," and she patted Adam and went soberly to bed.
+
+But Professor Willis did come again.  Not so frequently, of course, as
+to compromise his dignity.  An instructor who called on freshman girls
+was always laughed at.  But several times during the winter and spring
+he appeared at the cottage, and talked with Lydia earnestly and
+intellectually.  Nor did he always confine his calls to the evening.
+
+One Sunday afternoon in March Amos was in town with John Levine, who
+was on one of his hurried visits home, when Billy Norton came over to
+the cottage.
+
+Lydia, who was poring over "The Ring and the Book," saw at once that
+something was wrong.
+
+"What's worrying you, Billy?" she asked.
+
+"Lydia," he said, dropping into Amos' chair and folding his big arms,
+"you know my tract of land--the one I was going to buy from an Indian?
+I paid young Lone Wolf a ten dollar option on it while I looked round
+to see how I could raise enough to pay him a fair price.  He's only a
+kid of seventeen and stone blind from trachoma.  Well, yesterday I
+found that Marshall had bought it in.  Of course, I didn't really think
+Lone Wolf knew what an option was, but Marshall and the Indian Agent
+and Levine and all the rest knew what I was trying to do, so I thought
+they'd keep their hands off."
+
+"What a shame!" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+"Yes," said Billy grimly, a certain tensity in his tones that made
+Lydia look at him more closely, "Yes, a shame.  The way Marshall did it
+was this.  He looked young Lone Wolf up and gave him a bag of candy.
+The Indians are crazy for candy.  Then he told him to make his cross on
+a piece of paper.  That that was a receipt that he was to keep and if
+he'd show it at the store whenever he wanted candy, he'd have all he
+wanted, for nothing.  And he had two half-breeds witness it.  What
+Marshall had done was to get Lone Wolf to sign a warranty deed, giving
+Marshall his pine land.  The poor devil of an Indian didn't know it
+till yesterday when he showed me his 'receipt' in great glee.  Of
+course, they'll swear he's a mixed blood."
+
+Lydia was speechless with disgust for a moment, then she burst out,
+"Oh, I wish that reservation had never been heard of!  It demoralizes
+every one who comes in contact with it."
+
+"Lydia," said Billy, slowly, "I'm going to expose Marshall."
+
+"What do you mean?" Lydia looked a little frightened.
+
+"I mean that I'm going to show up his crooked deals with the Indians.
+I'm going to rip this reservation graft wide open.  I'm not going to
+touch an acre of the land myself so I can go in with clean hands and
+I'm not going to forget that I came pretty close to being a skunk,
+myself."
+
+"Oh, but, Billy!" cried Lydia.  "There's John Levine and all our
+friends--oh, you can't do it!"
+
+"Look here, Lydia," Billy's voice was stern, "are you for or against
+Indian graft?"
+
+Lydia drew a long breath but was spared an immediate answer for there
+was a knock on the door and Kent came in, followed shortly by Professor
+Willis.
+
+"Well," said Kent, after Lydia had settled them all comfortably, "I
+just left Charlie Jackson--poor old prune!"
+
+"Oh, how is he?" asked Lydia eagerly, "and what is he doing?"
+
+"He's pretty seedy," answered Kent.  "He's been trying to keep the
+whites off the reservation by organizing the full bloods to stand
+against the half-breeds.  But after a year of trying he's given up
+hope.  The full bloods are fatalists, you know, and Charlie has gone
+back to it himself."
+
+"Charlie Jackson is an old schoolmate of ours."  Lydia turned to Willis
+and gave him a rapid sketch of Charlie's life.  The Harvard man was
+deeply interested.
+
+"Can't you get him back to his work with the doctor?" he asked Kent.
+
+Kent shook his head.  "The only way to keep an Indian from reverting is
+to put him where he never can see his people or the reservation.
+Charlie's given up.  He's drinking a little."
+
+"And still you folks will keep on, stealing the reservation!" exclaimed
+Billy.
+
+Kent gave Billy a grin, half irritated, half whimsical.  "I know it's
+Sunday, old man, but don't let's have a sermon.  You're a farmer, Bill,
+anyhow, no matter what else you try to be."
+
+"Thank God for that," laughed Billy.
+
+"My word!" ejaculated Willis.  "What a country!  You spout the classics
+on week days and on holidays you steal from the aborigines!"
+
+"Oh, here, draw it mild, Professor!" growled Kent.
+
+"Well, but it's true," exclaimed Lydia.  "Where's our old New England
+sense of fairness?"
+
+"That's good too," said Kent.  "Who was brisker than our forefathers at
+killing redskins?"
+
+"Altogether a different case," returned the Harvard man.  "Our
+forefathers killed in self-defense.  You folks are killing out of
+wanton greed."
+
+"That's the point, exactly," said Billy.
+
+Kent gave his cheerful grin.  "Call it what you please," he laughed.
+"As long as the whites _will_ have the land, I'm going to get my share."
+
+Nobody spoke for a moment.  Lydia looked from Billy to Kent, and back
+again.  Kent was by far the handsomer of the two.  He had kept the
+brilliant color and the charming glow in his eyes that had belonged to
+his boyhood.  He dressed well, and sat now, knees crossed, hands
+clasped behind his head, with easy grace.  Billy was a six-footer,
+larger than Kent and inclined to be raw-boned.  His mouth was humorous
+and sensitive, his gray eyes were searching.
+
+"Let's not talk about it," Lydia said.  "Let's go out in the kitchen
+and pop corn and make candy."  This with a little questioning glance at
+the professor of Shakespeare.  He, however, rose with alacrity, and the
+rest of the afternoon passed without friction.  Willis developed a
+positive passion for making popcorn balls and he left with Kent at dusk
+proudly bearing off a bag of the results of his labors.
+
+Billy stayed after the rest and helped Lydia to clean up the dishes.
+Kent would never have thought of this, Lydia said to herself with a
+vague pang.  When they had finished Billy gravely took Lydia's coat
+from the hook and said, "Come, woman, and walk in the gloaming with
+your humble servant."
+
+Lydia giggled and obeyed.  There was still snow, in the hollows but the
+road was clear and frozen hard.  They walked briskly till a rise in the
+road gave them a view of the lake and a scarlet rift in the sky where
+the sun had sunk in a bank of clouds.
+
+"Now, Lydia," said Billy, "answer my question.  Are you for or against
+Indian graft?"
+
+"I just won't take sides," announced Lydia, obstinately.
+
+Billy stepped round in front of the young girl and put both hands
+gently on her shoulders.  "Look at me, Lydia," he said.  "You have to
+take sides!  You can't escape it.  You mean too much to too many of us
+men.  You've got to take a perfectly clear stand on questions like
+this.  It means too much to America for you not to.  Your influence
+counts, in that way if in no other, don't you see."
+
+Lydia's throat tightened.  "I won't take sides against Mr. Levine," she
+repeated.
+
+"Do you mean that you don't want me to expose Marshall?" asked Billy.
+
+"You've no right to ask me that."  Lydia's voice was cross.
+
+"But I have.  Lydia, though you don't want it, my life is yours.  No
+matter whether we can ever be anything else, we are friends, aren't we,
+friends in the deepest sense of the word,--aren't we, Lydia?"
+
+Lydia stared at Billy in silence.  Perhaps it was the glow from the
+west that helped to deepen and soften his gray eyes, for there was
+nothing searching in them now.  There was a depth and loyalty in them
+and a something besides that reminded her vaguely of the way John
+Levine looked at her.  A crow cawed faintly from the woods and the wind
+fluttered Billy's hair.
+
+Friendship!  Something very warm and high and fine entered Lydia's
+heart.
+
+"Yes, we are friends.  Billy," she said slowly.  "But oh, Billy, don't
+make me decide that!"
+
+"Lydia, you must!  You can't have a friend and not share his problems
+and you can't live in a community and not share its problems, if you're
+going to be worth anything to the world."
+
+"But if the problems really meant anything to you," protested Lydia,
+"you wouldn't depend on some girl to shove you into them."
+
+"But men do.  They are built that way.  Not _some_ girl but _the girl_.
+Every great cause was fought for some woman!  Oh, Lydia, Lydia!"
+
+"Billy," Lydia looked away from him to the lake, "you'll have to let me
+think about it.  You see, it's deciding my attitude toward all my
+friends, even toward Dad.  And I hadn't intended ever to decide."
+
+"And will you tell me, to-morrow, or next day, Lydia?"
+
+"I'll tell you as soon as I decide," she answered.
+
+Amos brought John Levine home with him for supper.  It seemed to Lydia
+that Levine never had been dearer to her than he was that evening.
+After supper, they drew up around the base burner in the old way, while
+the two men smoked.  Lizzie sat rocking and rubbing her
+rheumatism-racked old hands and Adam, who snored worse as he grew old,
+wheezed with his head baking under the stove.  Levine did not talk of
+the Indians, to Lydia's relief, but of Washington politics.  As the
+evening drew to a close, and Amos went out to his chickens as usual
+after Lizzie had gone to bed, John turned to Lydia.
+
+"What are you reading, these days, young Lydia?"
+
+"Browning--'The Ring and the Book,'" replied Lydia.
+
+John shook his head.  "Really grown up, aren't you, Lydia?  Do you
+enjoy being a young lady?"
+
+"Yes, I do, only I miss the old days when I saw so much of you."
+
+"Do you, my dear?" asked Levine, eagerly.  "In what ways do you miss
+me?"
+
+"Oh, every way!  No one will ever understand me as you do."
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  There are Billy and Kent."
+
+Lydia shook her head, though Billy's face in the moonlight after the
+graduation party, returned unexpectedly to her memory as she did so.
+
+"There'll never be any one like you."  Then moved by a sudden impulse
+she leaned toward him and said, "No matter what happens, you will
+always know that I love you, won't you, Mr. Levine?"
+
+John looked at the wistful face, keenly.  "Why, what could happen,
+young Lydia?"
+
+"Oh, lots of things!  I'm grown up now and--and I have to make
+decisions about the rightness and the wrongness of things.  But no
+matter what I decide, _nothing_ can change my love for you."
+
+"Lydia, come here," said Levine, abruptly.
+
+In the old way, Lydia came to his side and he pulled her down to the
+arm of his chair.  For a moment they sat in silence, his arm about her,
+her cheek against his hair, staring into the glowing stove.
+
+"When you were just a little tot," said Levine at last, "you were full
+of gumption and did your own thinking.  And I've been glad to see you
+keep the habit.  Always make your own decisions, dear.  Don't let me or
+any one else decide matters of conscience for you.  'To thine own self
+be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be
+false to any man.'  Eh, little girl?"
+
+He rose as he heard Amos coming in the back door, and with his hand
+under Lydia's chin, he looked long and earnestly into her eyes.  Then
+as Billy had done earlier in the evening, he sighed, "Oh, Lydia!
+Lydia!" and turned away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS
+
+
+"Nothing is so proud or so brave as the young pine when it first tops
+the rest of the forest."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+For several days Lydia was unhappy and absent-minded.  At first, in her
+thoughts she was inclined to blame Billy for forcing this turmoil of
+mind on her.  But, a little later, she admitted to herself that for
+years, something within her had been demanding that she take a stand on
+the Indian question something to which Charlie Jackson and Billy had
+appealed, something which Kent and John Levine had ignored.  Yet
+neither Charlie nor Billy had really forced her to a decision.
+
+Lydia was grown up.  All her young life she had carried the
+responsibilities and had faced the home tragedies that come usually
+only to grown folk.  Now, in her young womanhood it was natural and
+inevitable that she should turn to the larger responsibilities of the
+living world about her in order to satisfy the larger needs of her
+maturity.
+
+Yet, still old affection fought with new clarity of vision.  Old
+loyalty quarreled with new understanding.  Bit by bit she went over her
+thinking life, beginning with her first recollection of Charlie Jackson
+in the class in Civil Government, and all that was feminine and blind
+devotion in her fought desperately with all that education and her
+civic-minded forefathers had given her.
+
+Coming home from her last recitation, one mild afternoon, she stopped
+at the gate and looked up into the pine tree.  Its scent carried her
+back to the cloistered wood on the reservation and once more the desire
+for the soil was on her.  She leaned against the giant tree trunk and
+looked out over the lake, steel blue and cold in the March sunshine.
+And there with the lowing of the Norton herds and the hoarse call of
+the crows mingling with the soft voice of the pine and the lapping of
+the lake, she made her decision.  For clearly as though the pine had
+put it into words, something said to Lydia that it was not her business
+to decide whether or not the Indians deserved to live.  It was her
+business to recognize that in their method of killing the Indians, the
+whites had been utterly dishonorable.  That her refusing to take a
+stand could not exonerate them.  History would not fail to record the
+black fact against her race that, a free people, the boasted vanguard
+of human liberty, Americans had first made a race dependent, then by
+fraud and faithlessness, by cruelty and debauchery, were utterly
+destroying it.  And finally, that by closing her eyes to the facts,
+because of her love for Levine, she was herself sharing the general
+taint.
+
+It was Lydia's first acknowledgment of her responsibility to America,
+and it left her a little breathless and trembling.  She turned back to
+the road and made her way swiftly to the Norton place.  She did not go
+into the house, but down the lane where she could see Billy putting up
+the bars after the cattle.  He waited for her, leaning against the
+rails.
+
+"Billy," she said, panting, her cheeks bright and her yellow hair
+blowing, "I'm against the Indian grafting."
+
+Billy put out his hand, solemnly, and the two shook hands.  For all
+Billy was four years older than Lydia, they both were very, very young.
+So young that they believed that they could fight single-handed the
+whole world of intrigue and greed in which their little community was
+set.  So young that they trembled and were filled with awe at the vast
+importance of their own dreams.  And yet, futile as they may seem, it
+is on young decisions such as these that the race creeps upward!
+
+"What are you going to do, Billy?" asked Lydia.
+
+"I'm going to get a government investigation started, somehow," he
+replied.  "It'll take time, but I'll get it."
+
+Lydia looked at him admiringly, then she shivered a little.  "I hate to
+think of it, but I'll stand by you, Billy, whatever you do."
+
+"I'm going into ex-Senator Alvord's law office this June.  I'll bet
+he'll help.  He's so sore at Levine.  It'll be lovely muckraking, Lyd!"
+
+"I hate to think of it," she said unsteadily.  "Lizzie is miserable,
+to-day.  Will you tell your mother, Billy, and ask her to come over to
+see her this evening?  I mustn't stop any longer now."
+
+Poor old Lizzie was miserable, indeed.  For years, she had struggled
+against rheumatism, but now it had bound her, hand and foot.  Ma Norton
+came over in the evening.  Lizzie was in bed shivering and flushed and
+moaning with pain.
+
+"Now, don't bother about me," she insisted.  "Lydia's threatening to
+stay home to-morrow, and I tell you I won't have it," and the poor old
+soul began to cry weakly.
+
+Ma pulled the covers over the shaking shoulders.  "If I were you,
+Lizzie, I'd think about getting well and let Lydia do what she thinks
+best.  A day or so out of school isn't going to count in the long run
+with a young thing like her."
+
+She waited till Lizzie slept, then she told Lydia and Amos that Dr.
+Fulton had better be called, and Amos with a worried air, started for
+town at once.
+
+Dr. Fulton shook his head and sighed.
+
+"She's in for a run of rheumatic fever.  Get some extra hot water
+bottles and make up your mind for a long siege, Lydia."
+
+And it was a long siege.  Six weeks of agony for Lizzie, of nursing and
+housework and worrying for Lydia.  Ma Norton and the neighbors gave
+what time they could, but the brunt, of course, fell on Lydia.  She
+fretted most about her college work.  Sitting by Lizzie's bed, when the
+old lady dozed in her brief respites from pain, she tried to carry on
+her lessons alone, but with indifferent success.  She was too tired to
+concentrate her mind.  Trigonometry rapidly became a hopeless tangle to
+her; Ancient History a stupid jumble of unrelated dates.  And most of
+all, as the days went by, she felt the indifference of University folk.
+Nobody cared that she had dropped out, it seemed to her.
+
+Billy called every evening on his way home to supper.  He filled water
+buckets, chopped wood and fed the chickens, that Amos might be free to
+take Lydia's place.  John Levine sat up two or three nights a week.
+Kent came out once a week, with a cheery word and a basket of fruit.
+And at frequent intervals, the Marshall surrey stopped at the gate and
+Elviry or Dave appeared with some of Elviry's delicious cookery for
+Lydia and Amos.
+
+One afternoon in April when Lizzie had at last taken a turn for the
+better, Lydia elected to clean the kitchen floor.  She was down on her
+hands and knees scrubbing when there came a soft tap on the open door.
+She looked up.  Professor Willis was standing on the steps.
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia, rising with burning cheeks.
+
+"I--I couldn't make any one hear at the front door.  I came to see why
+you didn't come to class."
+
+Lydia was wearing a faded and outgrown blue gingham.  Her face was
+flushed but there were black rings round her eyes, and she was too
+tired to be polite.
+
+"I think it's just awful for you to come on me, scrubbing floors!  You
+should have knocked at the front door, till I heard," she said, crossly.
+
+The Harvard man looked at her seriously.  "I really never saw a girl
+playing golf look as pretty as you do, scrubbing floors.  May I come
+in?"
+
+He did not wait for an invitation but stepped over the pail and brush
+to the chair beside the table.  An open book lay on the chair.  He
+picked it up.  "'Ancient Rome,'" he read.
+
+"I'm trying to keep up."  Lydia was drying her red hands on the roller
+towel.  Her shoulders drooped despondently.  "What's the use of trying
+to be a lady," she said, suddenly, "when you have to fight poverty like
+this!  You oughtn't to have come on me this way!"
+
+The Harvard man looked from the immaculate kitchen to the slender girl,
+with her fine head, and then at the book in his hand.
+
+"Of course, I've never known a girl like you.  But I should imagine
+that eventually you'll achieve something finer out of your poverty than
+the other girls at the University will out of their golf and tennis.  I
+don't fancy that our New England mothers were ashamed of scrubbing
+floors."
+
+He looked at her with a smile on his pale face.  Suddenly Lydia smiled
+in return.  "Sit down while I make us some tea," she said.  "I'll never
+try to play lady with you again."
+
+Willis stayed with her an hour, sitting in the kitchen where the open
+door showed the turquoise lake through a gray-green net of swelling
+tree buds.  He did not leave till Lizzie wakened.  He cleared up the
+tangle in Lydia's trigonometry for her and went over the lost lessons
+in Shakespeare, all the while with a vague lump in his throat over the
+wistful eagerness in the blue eyes opposite his, over the thin, red,
+watersoaked hands that turned the leaves of the books.
+
+When Billy called that evening he found Lydia more cheerful than she
+had been in weeks.  When she told him of her caller he looked at her
+thoughtfully and growled, "I hope he chokes," and not another word did
+he say while he finished Amos' chores.
+
+Professor Willis came out regularly after this and when Lydia returned
+to class work in May, she was able to work creditably through the
+reviews then taking place and in June to pass the examinations.
+
+During all this time she said nothing to Billy about his muckraking
+campaign.  In spite of her high resolves she half hoped he had given it
+up.  But she did not know Billy as well as she thought she did.  He
+finished his law course in June and entered ex-Senator Alvord's office
+as he had planned.  There was another election in the fall and John
+Levine was returned to Congress, this time almost without a struggle.
+So many of the voters of the community were profiting by the alienating
+of the mixed-blood pines that it would have been blatant hypocrisy on
+the part of Republicans as well as Democrats to have opposed him.  In
+fact, thanks to Levine, the town had entered on a period of
+unprecedented prosperity.  The college itself had purchased for a song
+a section of land to be used as an agricultural experiment station.
+
+Like a bomb, then, late in December fell the news that the Indian
+Commissioner had been called before a senate committee to answer
+questions regarding the relations of Lake City to the reservation.
+While following close on the heels of this announcement came word that
+a congressional commission of three had been appointed to sit at Lake
+City to investigate Indian matters.
+
+"Billy, how did you do it?" asked Lydia, in consternation.  He had
+overtaken her one bitter cold January afternoon, on her way home from
+college.
+
+"I didn't do much," said Billy.  "I just got affidavits, dozens of
+them, showing frauds, and gave them to Senator Alvord.  He has a lot of
+influence among the Democratic senators and is a personal friend of the
+President.  It was a wonderful chance, he saw, to hurt the Republicans,
+even though there were Democrats implicated.  The Indian Commissioner
+and Levine are both Republicans, you know.  Then, when he finally got
+the hearing before the Senate Committee, he smuggled Charlie Jackson
+and Susie and old Chief Wolf down there.  Nobody here knows that."
+
+Lydia's lips were set tightly as she plodded along the snowy road.
+
+"Billy," she said, finally, "are you doing this to get even with Dave
+Marshall?"
+
+"Lydia!" cried Billy, catching her arm and forcing her to stop and face
+him.  "Don't you know me better than that?  Don't you?"
+
+"Then why are you doing it?" demanded Lydia.
+
+"I'm doing it because I'm ashamed of what New Englanders have done with
+their heritage.  And I'm doing it for you.  To make a name for you.
+Look at me.  No, not at the lake, into my eyes.  You are going to marry
+me, some day, Lydia."
+
+"I'm not," said Lydia flatly.
+
+Billy laughed.  "You can't help yourself, honey.  It's fate for both of
+us.  Come along home!  You're shivering."
+
+"When you talk that way, I hate you!" exclaimed Lydia, but Billy only
+laughed again.
+
+Amos at first was furious when he heard of the investigation.  He, with
+every one else in town, was eager to know who had started the trouble.
+
+"Some sorehead," said Amos, "who couldn't get all the land he wanted,
+I'll bet.  And a sweet time the commission will have.  Why, they'll
+have to dig into the private history of every one in Lake City.  It'll
+ruin Levine!  Oh, pshaw!  No, it won't either!  He can get everything
+whitewashed.  That's the way American investigations always end!"
+
+But Levine could not get everything whitewashed.  The group of three
+commissioners sat for months and in that time they exposed to the
+burning sun of publicity the muck of thievery and dishonor on which
+Lake City's placid beauty was built.
+
+By some strange turn of fortune, Congress had chosen three honest men
+for this unsavory task, three men grimly and unswervingly determined to
+see the matter through.  They sat in rooms in the post-office building.
+In and out of the building day after day passed the Indians to face the
+sullen and unwilling whites summoned to hear and answer what these
+Indians had to say of them.  Charlie Jackson acted as interpreter.
+Lydia saw him once or twice on the street when he nodded coolly.  He
+had dropped his white associates completely.
+
+The local papers refused to report the commission's session.  But
+papers outside the State were voracious for the news and little by
+little tales were published to the world that made Lake City citizens
+when out of the city, hesitate to confess the name of their home town.
+
+The leading trustee of the Methodist Church was found to have married a
+squaw in order to get her pine and her pitiful Government allowance.
+His white wife and children left him when this was proved to them, and
+it was proved only when the starving squaw and her starving children
+were finally acknowledged by the trustee before the commission.
+
+The Methodists were held up to scorn for a few months until a prominent
+Presbyterian who was the leading grocer in town was found to have
+supplied the Indian Agent for years with tainted groceries for the
+Indians.
+
+The most popular dentist in town filled teeth for the Indians whenever
+they received their allowances.  His method of filling was simple.  He
+drove empty copper cartridge caps over the teeth.  These when burnished
+made a handsome showing until gangrene set in.  The afflicted Indians
+were then turned over to a popular young doctor of Lake City who took
+the next year's allowance from the bewildered patients.
+
+Marriage after marriage of squaws with Lake City citizens was
+unearthed, most of these same citizens also having a white family.
+Hundreds of tracts of lands that had been obtained by stealing or by
+fraud from full bloods were listed.  Bags of candy, bits of jewelry,
+bolts of cotton had been exchanged for pine worth thousands of dollars.
+
+It was a nerve-racking period for Lake City.  Whether purposely or not,
+the net did not begin to close round John Levine till toward the end of
+the hearing.  Nor did Levine come home until late in the summer, when
+the commission had been sitting for some months.
+
+In spite of a sense of apprehension that would not lift, the year was a
+happy one for Lydia.  In the first place, she went to three college
+dancing parties during the year.  The adaptability of the graduation
+gown was wonderful and although Lydia knew that she was only a little
+frump compared with the other girls, Billy, who took her each time,
+always wore the _dress suit_!  So she shone happily in reflected
+elegance.
+
+In the second place, three men called on her regularly--Billy, Kent and
+Professor Willis.
+
+In the third place, Kent asked her to go with him to the last party
+and, to Lydia's mind, a notable conversation took place at that time.
+
+"Thanks, Kent," said Lydia, carelessly, "but I'm going with Billy."
+
+"Billy!  Always Billy!" snorted Kent.  "Why, you and I were friends
+before we ever heard of Billy!"
+
+"Yes," returned Lydia calmly, "and in all these years this is the first
+time you've asked me to go to a party.  I've often wondered why."
+
+Kent moved uncomfortably.  "Pshaw, Lyd, you know I always went with
+some girl I was having a crush on--that was why."
+
+"And don't you ever ask a girl to go to a party unless you have a crush
+on her?" asked Lydia, mischievously.
+
+Kent gave her a clear look.  "No!" he replied.
+
+Lydia flushed, then she said, slowly, "That's only half true, Kent.
+You've always liked me as I have you.  But you've always been ashamed
+of my clothes.  I don't blame you a bit, but you can imagine how I feel
+about Billy, who's taken me, clothes or no clothes."
+
+It was Kent's turn to flush and he did so to such an extent that Lydia
+was sorry for him while she waited for him to answer.
+
+"Hang it, Lyd, I've been an infernal cad, that's all!"
+
+"And," Lydia went on, mercilessly, "I've got nothing to wear now but
+the same old graduating dress.  I suppose you were hoping for better
+things?"
+
+"Stop it!" Kent shouted.  "I deserve it, but I'm not going to take it.
+I'm asking you for just one reason and that is, I've waked up to the
+fact that you're the finest girl in the world.  No one can hold a
+candle to you."
+
+There was a sudden lilt in Lydia's voice that did not escape Kent as
+she answered laughingly, "Well, if you feel the same after seeing
+Margery this summer, I'll be glad to go to one of the hops next fall
+with you, and thank you, deeply, Mr. Moulton."
+
+"All right," said Kent, soberly.  "The first hop next fall is mine and
+as many more as I can get."
+
+It was late in the spring and after the conversation with Kent, that it
+began to be rumored about town that ex-Senator Alvord's office was at
+the bottom of the Indian investigation.  Billy had been called in to
+testify and had shown an uncanny amount of knowledge of fraudulent land
+deals and Alvord had corroborated many of his statements.
+
+Kent accused Billy of this openly, one Sunday afternoon at Lydia's.
+They were sitting on the lake shore, for the day was parching hot.
+Both the young men were in flannels and hatless, and lolled on the
+grass at Lydia's feet, as she sat with her back against a tree.  She
+noticed how Kent was all grace, and ease, while Billy, whose face had
+lately become thinner, was all gaunt angles.
+
+"I'm willing to take the blame, if necessary," said Billy.
+
+Kent sat up with sudden energy.  "Look here, if it once got round town
+that you're the father of this, you'll be run out of Lake City."
+
+Billy laughed.  "Oh, no I won't!  All you respectable citizens have got
+too many troubles of your own."
+
+"Nice thing to do to your friends and neighbors, Bill," Kent went on,
+excitement growing in his voice as he realized the import of Billy's
+acknowledgment.  "What the deuce did you do it for?"
+
+Billy shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.  Kent appealed to Lydia.
+"Would you have gone to parties with him if you'd known what he was
+doing to his town, Lyd?"
+
+Billy was still lying on both elbows, industriously herding a pair of
+ants.  He did not look up at Lydia as she stared at his massive blond
+head.
+
+"Kent, I knew it," said Lydia, after a pause.
+
+"You knew it!  You let a lot of sickly sentimentality ruin Lake City in
+the eyes of the world?  Not only that.  Think what's coming to John
+Levine!  Think what's coming to me, though I've done little enough!"
+
+"Then I'm glad it came to stop you; while you'd still done little!"
+cried Lydia.
+
+"Nonsense!" snapped Kent.  "Of course, you don't expect anything but
+gush from a girl about the Indians.  But I don't see what you get out
+of it, Bill.  Who's paying you?  Are you going to run for president on
+the purity ticket?"
+
+"There's no use in my trying to tell you why I did it," grunted Billy.
+
+"No, there isn't," agreed Kent.  "But I'll tell you this much.  Bill,
+you and I break right here and now.  I've no use for a sneak."
+
+Again Billy shrugged his shoulders.  Lydia looked at the two in
+despair, then she smiled and cried, "Oh, there's Margery!  Isn't she
+lovely!"
+
+It was Margery, just home from boarding-school, where she gaily
+announced as she shook hands she had been "finally finished."
+
+"Though," she added.  "Daddy wants to pack me right off again because
+of this silly investigation.  As if I wanted to miss the fun of viewing
+all our best family skeletons!"
+
+"Margery," cried Lydia, quickly, "you're so beautiful that you're
+simply above envy.  What a duck of a dress!"
+
+"Isn't it!" agreed Margery.  "Kent, do get me a chair.  I'll spoil all
+my ruffles on the grass.  Well!  Here I am!  And what were you all
+discussing so solemnly when I interrupted?"
+
+"Indian graft!" said Billy, laconically.
+
+"Isn't it awful!  And isn't it funny!  You know, I was actually proud
+that I lived in Lake City.  The girls used to point me out in school to
+visitors."
+
+Margery, exquisite in her dainty gown, her wonderful black eyes
+gleaming with fun, as a sample of Lake City dishonesty appealed to the
+sense of humor of her audience and they all laughed, though Lydia felt
+her throat tighten strangely as she did so,--Margery, made exquisite on
+the money of blind squaws and papooses that froze to death!
+
+"Daddy is all worked up, though I told him they certainly hadn't done
+anything much to him, so far, and I'd feel real neglected if they
+didn't find he had an Indian wife up his sleeve," Margery went on.
+"Oh, Billy, by the way.  Daddy says he thinks Senator Alvord started
+the whole thing.  Did he?"
+
+"Yes, and I helped," replied Billy shortly.
+
+"Well, I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself," cried Margery,
+airily.  "Don't you, Lydia?"
+
+"No, I don't, I'm proud of him, though I'm scared to death," said
+Lydia.  "Things are so much worse than I thought they'd be."
+
+"Well, I just tell you, Billy Norton," there was a sudden shrill note
+in Margery's voice, "if anything really horrid is unearthed about
+Daddy, I'll never speak to you again.  Would you, Kent?"
+
+"I don't intend to anyhow," replied Kent, coolly.  "How'd you come out,
+Marg?"
+
+"I walked from the trolley.  I'd no idea it was so hot."
+
+"Let me take you home in my toot-toot."
+
+"But I just got here," protested Margery.
+
+"It's now or never," said Kent, rising, "I've got to run along."
+
+"Oh, if it's that serious!"  Margery took Kent's arm.  "By-by, Lydia!
+Come over and see my new dresses."
+
+After they were gone, Billy sat up and looked at Lydia.  Neither spoke
+for a few moments.  The sun was sinking and all the world was enveloped
+in a crimson dust.  There had been a drought now for six weeks.  Even
+Amos' garden was languishing.
+
+"Lydia," said Billy, "I'm going to quit.  You know I've worked with
+Charlie Jackson right along."
+
+"Quit?  But Billy, why I--I didn't think you minded Kent and Margery
+that much!"
+
+"I don't mind them at all.  But, Lydia, I found yesterday my father got
+one hundred and twenty acres from a ten-year-old full-blood boy for
+five dollars and a bicycle.  Last week Charlie unearthed a full-blood
+squaw from whom your father had gotten two hundred and forty acres for
+an old sewing machine and twenty-five dollars.  I've done so much for
+the Indians and Charlie is so fond of you that he'll shut these Indians
+up, but I can't go on, after that, of course."
+
+Lydia was motionless.  Over the house top, the great branches of the
+pine were turned to flames.  The long drawn notes of a locust sounded
+above the steady drone of the crickets.  Lydia had a curiously old
+feeling.
+
+"I can't go on, Lydia," Billy repeated.  "My fine old father and dear
+old Amos!  I can't."
+
+"Yes, you'll go on, Billy," Lydia's voice was very low.  "After I faced
+what would come to John Levine through this, I can face anything."
+
+Billy gave a little groan and bowed his head on Lydia's knee.  Suddenly
+she felt years older than Billy.  She smoothed his tumbled blond hair.
+
+"Go on, Billy.  Our ancestors left England for conscience' sake.  And
+our grandfathers both laid down their lives for the Union."
+
+Lydia ended with a little gulp of embarrassment.  Billy caught her hand
+and sat up, looking eagerly through the gloaming at her face.
+
+"I told you all the battles of the world were fought for a woman," he
+said.  "Dear, I'll go on, though it'll break mother's heart."
+
+"It won't break her heart," said Lydia.  "Women's hearts don't break
+over that sort of thing."
+
+"Lydia!" called Amos from the doorway, "aren't you going to give me any
+supper to-night?"
+
+"Lord, it's two hours past milking time!" groaned Billy, and he started
+on a dog-trot for home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+DUCIT AMOR PATRIAE
+
+
+"The same soil that nourishes the Indian and the white, nourishes me.
+Yet they do not know that thus we are blood brothers."--_The Murmuring
+Pine_.
+
+
+It was the last week in August when John Levine was summoned before the
+commission.  Lydia and Amos were summoned with him.
+
+Lydia was frightened, Amos was irritable and sullen by turns after the
+summons finally came.  They were due at the hearing at nine o'clock and
+arrived a little late.  Amos had refused to be hurried.
+
+The room in which the hearing was held was big and cool, with a heavily
+carpeted floor and walls lined with black walnut bookcases.  There were
+two long tables at one end of the room behind one of which sat the
+three commissioners.  At the other table were the official
+stenographers and Charlie Jackson.  Before the tables were chairs and
+here were John Levine and Kent, Pa Norton, and Billy, old Susie and a
+younger squaw, with several bucks.
+
+Lydia and her father dropped into empty seats and Lydia gave a little
+sigh of relief when Levine caught her eye across the room and smiled at
+her.  She looked at the commissioners curiously.  They were talking in
+undertones to one another and she thought that they all looked tired
+and harassed.  She knew them fairly well from the many newspaper
+pictures she had seen of them.  The fat gentleman, with penetrating
+blue eyes and a clean-shaven face, was Senator Smith of Texas.  The
+roly-poly man, with black eyes and a grizzled beard, was Senator Elway
+of Maine, and the tall, smooth-shaven man with red hair was Senator
+James of New York.
+
+"Mr. Levine," said Senator Smith, suddenly, "we are sorry to have to
+put you to this inconvenience.  Believe us, we find our task no more
+savory than you do."
+
+Levine gave his slow, sardonic grin.  "Don't apologize, gentlemen.
+Only make the ordeal as short as you can."
+
+"We have done that," said Elway.  "We found that you had carried on so
+many--er--transactions that we finally decided to choose three or four
+sample cases and let our case stand on those.  First, we have found
+that full bloods have been repeatedly sworn as mixed bloods, in order
+that their lands might be alienated.  A curious idea, Mr. Levine, to
+attempt to legalize an illegality by false swearing.  Jackson, call
+Crippled Bear."
+
+Charlie, who had been sitting with arms folded, his somber eyes on
+Lydia, spoke quickly to one of the bucks, who rose and took the empty
+chair by Charlie.
+
+He began to talk at once, Charlie interpreting slowly and carefully.
+
+"I am a mixed blood.  I speak English pretty well when I am with only
+one white.  With so many, my English goes.  Many moons ago the man
+Levine found me drunk in the snow.  He picked me up and kept me in his
+house over night.  When I was sober, he fed me.  Then he made this
+plan.  I was to gather half a dozen half-breeds together, he could
+trust.  In the spring he would come up to the reservation and talk to
+us.  I did this and he came.  We were very hungry when he met us in the
+woods and he gave us food and money.  Then he told us he was going to
+get the big fathers at Washington to let us sell our pines so we could
+always have money and food.  Never be hungry any more--never."
+
+Charlie's voice was husky as he said this and he looked at Levine with
+his teeth bared, like a wolf, Lydia thought.
+
+"Then he said while he was getting that done, he would pay us a little
+every month to go through the woods and chop down the best trees.  The
+Big Father will let whites get 'dead and down' timber out of Indian
+woods, he said.  But not let whites cut any.  So we say yes, and though
+full bloods are very mad when we cut down big trees, we do it.  For
+many moons we do it and in winter, white men haul it to sawmills.
+
+"Every little while, Levine comes up there and we have a council and
+tell him everything that happens.  All about things Marshall and other
+whites do.  And he pays us always.  Then he tells us that the Big
+Father will let mixed bloods sell their pine lands but not full bloods.
+So then we agree when he wants any full blood land to swear that any
+full blood is mixed.  And we have done this now, perhaps twenty times."
+
+The mixed blood and Charlie paused, and Levine leaned forward.
+"Crippled Bear," he said, "why did you tell all this?"
+
+Crippled Bear Jerked a swarthy thumb at Billy Norton.  "That white," he
+answered in English, "tell me if I tell truth, maybe I get back all
+lands and pine.  I like that, you un'stand--for then I sell 'em again,
+un'stand."
+
+A little ripple of laughter went through the room, though John himself
+did not smile.  He looked at young Norton with his black eyes half
+closed.
+
+Mr. Smith took up a paper.  "I have here, Mr. Levine, a statement of
+your dealings with the Lake City Lumber Company.  You have had sawed by
+them during the past six or eight years millions of feet of pine
+lumber.  I find that you are holding Indian lands in the name of Lydia
+Dudley and her father, Amos Dudley, these lands legally belonging to
+full bloods.  Amos Dudley is also the purchaser of land from full
+bloods, as is William Norton, Senior, through you."
+
+Levine rose quickly.  "Gentlemen," he exclaimed, "surely you can find
+enough counts against me without including Miss Dudley, who has never
+heard of the matters you mention."
+
+Commissioner James spoke for the first time.  "Suppose we go on with
+the witnesses before we open any discussion with Mr. Levine.  Jackson,
+what have these squaws to tell?  Or first, what about the other bucks?"
+
+When Charlie had called the last of these Levine spoke, "I'd like to
+call the Government Roll-maker, Mr. Hardy."
+
+A small man, who had slipped into the room unnoticed during the
+proceedings, came forward.
+
+"What is your business, Mr. Hardy?" asked Levine.
+
+"I am sent here by the Indian office to make a Roll of the Indians on
+this reservation, in the attempt to discover which are full and which
+mixed bloods."
+
+"Do you find your task difficult, Mr. Hardy?"  Levine's voice was
+whimsical.
+
+"Very!  The Government allows a man to claim his Indian rights when he
+has as little as one sixty-fourth of Indian blood in his veins.  On the
+other hand, the older Indians are deadly ashamed of white blood in
+their veins and hate to admit it."
+
+"Mr. Hardy, you have your Rolls with you?  Yes?  Well, tell me the
+blood status of each of these witnesses."
+
+The room was breathless while the little Roll-maker ran through his
+list.  According to this not one of the witnesses against Levine was a
+full blood nor one of the Indians from whom he had taken land.  Even
+old Susie and Charlie's sister, he stated, had white blood in their
+veins.
+
+"It's a lie!" shouted Charlie.  "This man Hardy is paid by Levine!"
+
+"Gently, Jackson!" said Senator James.  "Mr. Levine, do you wish to
+call more witnesses?"
+
+"Not for the present," replied John.  "Let Jackson go on."
+
+Charlie called old Susie.  And old Susie, waving aside any attempts on
+Charlie's part to help, told of the death of her daughter from
+starvation and cold, this same daughter having sold her pines to Levine
+for a five-dollar bill and a dollar watch.  She held out the watch
+toward Levine in one trembling old hand.
+
+"I find this in dress, when she dead.  She strong.  It take her many
+days to die.  I old.  I pray Great Spirit take me.  No!  I starve!  I
+freeze!  I no can die.  She young.  She have little baby.  She die."
+
+Suddenly, she flung the watch at Levine's feet and sank trembling into
+her chair.
+
+There was silence for a moment.  In at the open window came the rumble
+of a street-car.  Levine cleared his throat.
+
+"All this is dramatic, of course, but doesn't make me the murderer of
+the squaw."
+
+"No! but you killed my father!" shouted Charlie Jackson.  And rising,
+he hurled forth the story he had told Lydia, years before.  Lydia sat
+with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes fastened in horror
+on Charlie's face.  A great actor had been lost in creating Charlie an
+Indian.  He pictured his father's death, his sister's two attempts at
+revenge with a vividness and power that held even Levine spell-bound.
+It seemed to Lydia that the noose was fastened closer round John's neck
+with every word that was uttered.
+
+Suddenly she sprang to her feet.  "Stop, Charlie!  Stop!" she screamed.
+"You shan't say any more!"
+
+Senator Elway rapped on the table.  "You're out of order, Miss Dudley,"
+he exclaimed, sharply.
+
+Lydia had forgotten to be embarrassed.  "I can't help it if I am," she
+insisted, "I won't have Charlie Jackson picturing Mr. Levine as a
+fiend, while I have a tongue to speak with.  I know how bad the Indian
+matters are.  Nobody's worried about it more than I have.  But Mr.
+Levine's not a murderer.  He couldn't be."
+
+The three commissioners had looked up at Lydia with a scowl when she
+had interrupted Charlie.  Now the scowl, as they watched her flushed
+face, gave way to arched eyebrows and a little smile, that was
+reflected on every face in the room except Charlie Jackson's.
+
+"Lydia, you keep out of this," he shouted.  "You don't know what you're
+talking about."
+
+"I do too!" stormed Lydia.  "I--"
+
+"Order!  Let Jackson finish, Miss Dudley," said Senator Smith.
+
+"I can't let him finish," cried Lydia, "until I tell you about Mr.
+Levine.  He's been as much to me as my own father ever since my mother
+died when I was a little girl.  He's understood me as only my own
+mother could, hasn't he, Daddy!"
+
+Amos nodded, with a little apologetic glance at the commissioners.
+Levine's eyes were fastened on Lydia's face with an expression that was
+as sweet as it was fathomless.  Charlie Jackson stood biting his nails
+and waiting, his affection for Lydia holding in abeyance his frenzied
+loyalty to his father.
+
+"You think he could murder when he could hold a little girl on his
+knees and comfort her for the death of her little sister, when he
+taught her how to find God, when--oh, I know he's robbed the
+Indians--so has my own father, it seems, and so has Pa Norton, and so
+has Kent, and all of them are dear people.  They've all been wrong.
+But think of the temptation, Mr. Commissioner!  Supposing you were poor
+and the wonderful pines lay up there, _so easy to take_."
+
+Senator Elway would have interrupted, but Senator James laid a hand on
+his arm.  "It's all informal, let her have her say," he whispered.
+"It's the first bright spot in all the weeks of the hearing."
+
+"Did you ever feel land hunger yourself," Lydia went on eagerly, "to
+look at the rows and rows of pine and think what it would mean to own
+them, forever!  It's the queerest, strongest hunger in the world.  I
+know, because I've had it.  Honestly, I have, as strongly as any one
+here--only--I knew Charlie Jackson and this awful tragedy of his and I
+knew his eyes would haunt me if I took Indian lands."
+
+"You're covering a good deal of ground and getting away from the
+specific case, Miss Dudley," said, Smith.  "Of course, what you say
+doesn't exonerate Mr. Levine.  On the other hand, Jackson has no means
+of proving him accessory to the murder of his father.  We've threshed
+that out with Jackson before.  What you say of Mr. Levine's character
+is interesting but there remains the fact that he has been proceeding
+fraudulently for years in his relations to the Indian lands.  You
+yourself don't pretend to justify your acts, do you, Mr. Levine?"
+
+Lydia sat down and Levine slowly rose and looked thoughtfully out of
+the window.  "The legality or illegality of the matter has nothing to
+do with the broader ethics of the case, though I think you will find,
+gentlemen, that my acts are protected by law," he said.  "The virgin
+land lies there, inhabited by a degenerate race, whose one hope of
+salvation lay in amalgamation with the white race.  An ignorant
+government, when land was plenty and the tribe was larger, placed
+certain restrictions on the reservation.  When land became scarce, and
+the tribe dwindled to a handful, those restrictions became wrong.  It
+was inevitable that the whites should override them.  Knowing that the
+ethics of my acts and those of other people would be questioned, I went
+to Congress to get these restrictions removed.  If another two years
+could have elapsed, before these investigations had been begun, the
+fair name of Lake City never would have been smirched."  Levine's hand
+on the back of his chair tightened as he looked directly at Billy
+Norton.
+
+Once more Lydia came to her feet.  "Oh, Mr. Levine," she exclaimed,
+"don't put all the blame on Billy!  Really, it's my fault.  He wouldn't
+have done it if I hadn't agreed that it was right.  And he would have
+stopped when he found that Dad and his father had taken full blood
+lands only--why--why, I said that if I could stand his showing that you
+had been--crooked--up there, I could stand anything and I made him go
+on."
+
+She stopped with a little break in her voice that was not unlike a sob.
+And for the first time there spread over John Levine's face a blush, so
+dark, so agonizing, that the men about him turned their eyes away.
+With a little groan, he sat down.  Lydia clasped her hands.
+
+"Oh, it is all my fault," she repeated brokenly, "all the trouble
+that's come to Lake City."
+
+Billy Norton jumped up.  "That's blamed nonsense!" he began, when Smith
+interrupted him, impatiently.
+
+"Be seated, Norton."  Then, gently, to Lydia, "My dear, you mean that,
+knowing what an investigation would mean to the people you love, you
+backed young Norton in instigating one.  That you knew he would not go
+on without your backing?"
+
+"Yes, sir," faltered Lydia.
+
+"Can you tell us why?" asked Elway, still more gently.
+
+Lydia, whose cheeks were burning and whose eyes were deep with unshed
+tears, twisted her hands uncomfortably and looked at Billy.
+
+"Go ahead, Lyd," he said, reassuringly.
+
+"Because it was right," she said, finally.  "Because--Ducit Amor
+Patriae---you know, because no matter whether the Indians were good or
+bad, we had made promises to them and they depended on us."  She
+paused, struggling for words.
+
+"I did it because I felt responsible to the country like my ancestors
+did, in the Civil War and in the Revolution, to--to take care of
+America, to keep it clean, no matter how it hurt.  I--I couldn't be led
+by love of country and see my people doing something contemptible,
+something that the world would remember against us forever, and not try
+to stop it, no matter how it hurt."
+
+Trembling so that the ribbon at her throat quivered, she looked at the
+three commissioners, and sat down.
+
+James cleared his throat.  "Mr. Dudley, did you know your daughter's
+attitude when you undertook to get some pine lands?"
+
+Amos pulled himself to his feet.  His first anger at Lydia had given
+way to a mixture of feelings.  Now, he swallowed once or twice and
+answered, "Of course, I knew she was sympathetic with the Indians, but
+I don't know anything about the rest of it."
+
+The commissioners waited as though expecting Amos to go on.  He fumbled
+with his watch chain for a moment, staring out the window.  With his
+thin face, his high forehead and sparse hair, he never looked more like
+the picture of Daniel Webster than now.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "I'm a New Englander and I'm frank to admit that
+I've wandered a long way from the old ideals, like most of the New
+Englanders in America.  But that isn't saying, gentlemen, that I'm
+not--not darned proud of Lydia!"
+
+There was a little murmur through the room and Senator Elway smiled, a
+trifle sadly.  "Mr. Dudley," he said, "we're all proud of Lydia.  She's
+made our unsavory task seem better worth while."
+
+"I suggest that we adjourn for lunch," said Smith.  "Miss Dudley, you
+need not return."
+
+While her father paused to speak to Kent and Levine, Lydia made her
+escape.  She wanted more than anything in the world to be alone, but
+when she reached home, Ma Norton and Lizzie were waiting at the
+cottage, both of them half sick with anxiety.  They were not reassured
+by Lydia's story of the morning session, although Ma said,
+
+"Of course, it's the disgrace of the thing that worries us.  Pa and
+Billy say all this commission can do is to present their evidence to
+Congress.  I'm not saying, of course, that you weren't right plucky to
+take the stand you did, Lydia.  And I'm proud of Billy though he is
+bringing trouble on his poor father!"
+
+Lydia spent the afternoon with Adam in the woods.  She expected John
+Levine to come home with her father to supper, and for the first time
+in her life, she did not want to meet her best loved friend.  But she
+might have spared herself this anxiety, for Amos came home alone.
+Levine was busy, he said.
+
+Amos was in a curiously subdued mood.  Whatever Lydia had expected of
+him, she had not expected the almost conciliatory attitude he took
+toward her.  It embarrassed her far more than recriminations would have.
+
+"I do think, Lydia," he said mildly, after they had discussed the
+morning session, "you should have told me what was going on.  But
+there, I suppose, I'd have raised Cain, if you had."
+
+"Is Mr. Levine very angry with me?" asked Lydia.
+
+"He didn't say.  I don't see how he can be.  After all, the stuff was
+bound to come out, sooner or later.  He's got something up his sleeve.
+This experience's done one thing.  It's brought all the different
+factions together.  Disgrace loves company as well as misery."
+
+"I'm so worried about it all!" sighed Lydia.
+
+"Kind of late in the day for you to worry," sniffed Amos.  "I suppose
+Billy's worrying too!  But there, I guess you two have put some saving
+grace into Lake City, in the commission's eyes.  Of course, I'm going
+to give up any claim on those lands."
+
+Amos pulled at his pipe thoughtfully and looked at Lydia's tired,
+wistful face complacently.  He did not tell her that the three
+commissioners had individually and collectively congratulated him on
+Lydia and their praise had been such that he felt that any disgrace he
+had suffered in connection with the Indian lands had been more than
+counteracted by Lydia's performance.
+
+To Lydia's pain and disappointment, Levine did not come to the cottage
+before he returned to Washington, which he did the week following the
+hearing.  And then, all thought of her status with him was swallowed up
+in astonishment over the revelations that came out early in September
+when Dave Marshall and the Indian Agent were called before the
+commission.
+
+Dave Marshall was the owner of the Last Chance!  The Last Chance where
+"hussies" lay in wait like vultures for the Indian youths, took their
+government allowances, took their ancient Indian decency, and cast them
+forth to pollute their tribe with drink and disease.  The Last Chance!
+The headquarters for the illegal selling of whisky to Indians.  Where
+Indians were taught to evade the law, to carry whisky into the
+reservation and where in turn the bounty for their arrest was pledged
+to Marshall.  The Last Chance, the main source of Dave Marshall's
+wealth!
+
+Even Lake City was horrified by these revelations.  People began to
+remove their money from his bank and for a time a run was threatened,
+then Dave resigned as president and the run was stayed.  The drugstore
+owned by Dave was boycotted.  The women of the town began to cut
+Margery and Elviry.  The minister of the Methodist Church asked Dave
+for his resignation as Trustee.
+
+To say that old Lizzie was pleased by the revelations would be perhaps
+to do the old lady an injustice.  Yet the fact remains that she did go
+about with a knowing, "I told you so" air, that smacked of complacency.
+
+"He always was just _skulch_," she insisted to Lydia.  "When he was a
+child, he was the kind of a brat mothers didn't want their children to
+play with.  I always prayed he'd get his come-uppers, and Elviry too.
+But I am sorry for Margery.  Poor young one!  Her future's ruined."
+
+Lydia, sitting on the front steps in the lovely September afternoons,
+rubbed Adam's ears, watched the pine and the Norton herds and thought
+some long, long thoughts.  Finally, one hazy Saturday afternoon, she
+gathered a great bunch of many colored asters and started off, without
+telling Lizzie of her destination.
+
+It was nearly five o'clock when she stopped at the Marshalls' gate.
+The front of the house was closed, but nothing daunted, she made her
+way round to the kitchen door, which was open.  Elviry answered her rap.
+
+"Oh, it's Lydia," she said, brusquely.  "What do you want?"
+
+"I brought Marg some flowers," answered Lydia, awkwardly.
+
+Elviry hesitated.  "Margery's been having a headache and I don't know
+as she'd want to see you."
+
+Lydia was not entirely daunted.  "Well, if you're getting supper you
+might let me come and sit in the kitchen a few minutes.  It's quite a
+walk in from the cottage."
+
+Elviry opened the screen door and Lydia marched in and paused.  Dave
+Marshall was sitting by the kitchen table, his hat on the back of his
+head, a pile of newspapers on the floor beside him.  He did not speak
+to Lydia when she came in, but Lydia nodded brightly at him and said,
+"You like to sit in the kitchen, the way Dad does, don't you?"
+
+She sat down in the rocker by the dining-room door and Elviry began to
+stir a kettle of catsup that was simmering on the back of the stove.
+
+This was worse than Lydia had thought it would be.  She had not
+calculated on Dave's being at home.  However, her fighting blood was up.
+
+"You haven't asked me about my clothes, Mrs. Marshall," she said.
+"Don't you think I did pretty well with this skirt?"
+
+Elviry glanced at the blue serge skirt.  "It'll do," she answered
+listlessly.
+
+Lydia looked at Dave desperately.  At that moment there was a light
+step in the dining-room, and Margery came into the kitchen.  When she
+saw Lydia she gasped.
+
+"Hadn't you heard?  Oh, Lydia!  You came anyhow!" and suddenly Margery
+threw herself down and sobbed with her face in Lydia's lap.
+
+Elviry threw her apron over her head and Dave, with a groan, dropped
+his head on his chest.  For a moment, there was only the crackling of
+the fire in the stove and Margery's sobs to be heard.
+
+Then Dave said, "What did you come for, Lydia?  You only hurt yourself
+and you can't help us.  I don't know what to do!  God!  I don't know
+what to do!"
+
+"I don't see why everybody acts so," cried Elviry, "as if what you'd
+done was any worse than every one else's doings."
+
+Margery raised her head.  "Of course it's worse!  A thousand times
+worse!  I could have stood Dad's even having an Indian wife, better
+than this."
+
+Dave looked at Margery helplessly and his chin quivered.  Lydia noticed
+then how old he was looking.
+
+"I want Margery and her mother to pack up and go away--for good," said
+Dave to Lydia.  "I'll close up here and follow when I can.  None of
+these cases will ever come to anything in our state court.  It's the
+disgrace--and the way the women folks take it."
+
+"I--I've been thinking," said Lydia, timidly, "that what you ought to
+do--"
+
+Margery was sitting back on the floor now and she interrupted bitterly.
+"I don't see why you should try to help us, Lyd.  Mother's always
+treated you dirt mean."
+
+"It's not because of your mother," said Lydia, honestly.  "I couldn't
+even try to forgive her--but--your father did a great favor to me and
+once I promised him then to be his friend.  And you, Margery, you were
+fond of--of little Patience, and she did love you so!  If she'd lived,
+I know she'd have wanted me to stand by you."
+
+"She was a dear little kiddie," said Margery.  "I always meant to tell
+you how I cried when she died, and then somehow, you were so silent, I
+couldn't."
+
+The old lines round Lydia's mouth deepened for a minute, then she
+swallowed and said,
+
+"I don't think it would do a bit of good for you all to go away.  The
+story would follow you.  Mr. Marshall ought to sell out everything and
+buy a farm.  Let Mrs. Marshall go off for a visit, if she wants to, and
+let Margery come and stay with me a while and go to college."
+
+Dave raised his head.  "That's what I'd rather do, Lydia, for myself.
+Just stay here and try to live it down.  I'd like to farm it.  Always
+intended to."
+
+Margery wrung her hands.  "Oh, I don't see how I can!  If it had been
+anything, anything but the Last Chance.  Everybody will cut me and talk
+about me."
+
+"Oh, well, Margery," said Lydia, a little impatiently, "it's the first
+trouble you've had in all your life and it won't kill you.  Anybody
+that's as pretty as you are can live down anything.  I know our house
+is awful scrimpy, but we'd have some good times, anyhow.  Kent and
+Billy will stand by us and we'll pull through.  See if we don't."
+
+"I don't see why she needs to go to your house," said Elviry.  "Let her
+stay right here, and go up to college with you if she will.  And I
+don't want to go live on a farm, either."
+
+"Mother, you don't understand, yet!" exclaimed Margery.
+
+"Elviry," said Dave grimly, "our day is over.  All we can hope to save
+out of the wreck is a future for Margery.  Just get that through your
+head once and for all.  I think Lydia's idea is horse sense.  But it's
+for Margery to decide."
+
+Margery got up from her place on the floor.  "I thought we'd sell out
+and go to Europe for the rest of our lives," she said, "but as Lydia
+says, the story would follow us there.  Dad," sharply, "you aren't
+going to _sell_ the Last Chance and use that money?"
+
+"I closed it up, last week," said Dave shortly.  "I'm going to have the
+place torn down."
+
+Margery rubbed her hand over her forehead.  "Well," she said, "I don't
+see that I'd gain anything but a reputation for being a quitter, if I
+went to Lydia's.  I'll stay with you folks, but I'll go to college, if
+Lydia'll stand by me."
+
+Lydia rose.  "Then that's settled.  On Monday we'll register.  I'll
+meet you on the eight o'clock car."
+
+"I can't thank you, Lyd,--" began Margery.
+
+"I don't want any thanks," said Lydia, making for the door, where Dave
+intercepted her with outstretched hand.
+
+Lydia looked up into his dark face and her own turned crimson.  "I
+can't shake hands," she said, "honestly, I can't.  The Last Chance and
+the--the starving squaws make me sick.  I'll stand by Margery and help
+you--but I can't do that."
+
+Dave Marshall dropped his hand and turned away without a word and Lydia
+sped from the house into the sunset.
+
+Amos heard Lydia's story of her call with a none too pleased face.  "I
+don't think I want you mixing up with them, in any way," he said.
+
+"But let me help Margery," pleaded Lydia, "Little Patience did love her
+so!"
+
+"Well--Margery--you can help her," he agreed, reluctantly, "but you
+can't go near their house again.  Margery will have to do all the
+visiting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE MILITARY HOP
+
+
+"Who shall say that I do not understand what the wind sings in my
+branches or that I am less than the white or more than the
+Indian?"--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+In spite of the fact that Levine had avoided her, after the hearing,
+and in spite of all the many half tragic ramifications of the
+reservation trouble, Lydia was not unhappy.  In fact, when Registration
+day dawned she awoke with a sense of something good impending, sang as
+she dressed, and piloted Margery gaily through the complications of
+entering the University as a "special" student.
+
+Margery, for the first month or so, was silent and kept as close as
+possible to Lydia's apron strings.  But Lydia had prophesied truly.  No
+girl as beautiful as Margery could be kept in Coventry long and though
+she refused for a time to go to parties, it was not long before Margery
+was taking tramps with the college boys and joining happily enough in
+the simple pleasures at the cottage.
+
+Lydia did not hear from Kent until a week before the first college hop,
+late in October.  Then she received a formal note from him, reminding
+her of his invitation.
+
+"Oh, Lyd!" exclaimed Margery, "aren't you lucky!  I haven't seen Kent
+or heard from him since our trouble!"
+
+"Neither have I," said Lydia.  "And I suspect he's so cross with me
+that he hates to keep this engagement.  But I don't care.  I wish I had
+a new dress.  But I've made the sleeves small in my organdy and made a
+new girdle.  It looks as well as could be expected!" she finished,
+comically.
+
+"Lydia," cried Margery, suddenly, "I've a whole closet full of party
+dresses I won't wear this year and you and I are just of a size, won't
+you wear one--take one and keep it--please, Lydia!"
+
+Lydia flushed and shook her head.
+
+"Is it because they were bought with Dad's money?" asked Margery.
+
+Lydia's flush grew deeper.  "I couldn't take it anyway, Margery," she
+protested.  But Margery tossed her head and was silent for the rest of
+the afternoon.
+
+The hop was a success, a decided success, in spite of the organdy.
+Kent was inclined to be stiff, at first, and to wear a slightly injured
+air, and yet, mingled with this was a frank and youthful bravado.  And
+there could be no doubt that among the college boys, Kent was more or
+less of a hero.  It was something to boast of, evidently, to have one's
+name coupled with Levine's in the great scandal.
+
+Kent had supposed that he would have some trouble in filling Lydia's
+card for her, but to his surprise, he found that in her timid way,
+Lydia was something of a personage among the older college boys and the
+younger professors.
+
+"Oh, you have Miss Dudley.  Let me have three dances, will you," said
+the instructor in Psychology.  "How pretty she is to-night!"
+
+"Lydia is a peach," Kent stated briefly.  "One two-step is the best I
+can do for you."
+
+"Come now, Moulton, a two-step and a waltz," said Professor Willis.  "I
+haven't seen Miss Dudley since college opened.  Isn't her hair
+wonderful to-night!"
+
+Gustus was there with Olga.  "Gimme a waltz with Lydia, Kent," he
+demanded.  "Who'd ever thought she'd grow up so pretty!  If she could
+dress well--"
+
+"Her card's full," grunted Kent.  "And she dresses better'n any girl I
+know.  What's the matter with that dress?"
+
+The two young men stood watching Lydia, who was chatting with Professor
+Willis.  The dress was out of style.  Even their masculine eyes
+recognized that fact, yet where in the room was there a mass of dusty
+gold hair like Lydia's, where such scarlet cheeks, where such a look of
+untried youth?
+
+"Oh, well, it was just something Olga said," began Gustus.
+
+"Olga makes me sick," said Kent, and he stalked over to claim a waltz
+with Lydia.
+
+It was altogether an intoxicating evening and at its end Lydia pulled
+on her last winter's overcoat and clambered into Kent's little
+automobile, utterly satisfied with life.
+
+"Well, did I give you a good time, Miss?" asked Kent, as they
+chug-chugged down the Avenue.
+
+"Oh, Kent, it was wonderful!"
+
+"And you don't feel as if I were a villain any more?  You've forgiven
+me?"
+
+"Forgiven you?  For what?"
+
+"For not agreeing with you on the Indian question.  Gee, I was sore at
+you, Lyd, that morning at the hearing, and yet I was like your Dad.  I
+was proud of you, too."
+
+"Oh, don't let's talk about it, to-night, Kent," Lydia protested.
+
+"All right, old girl, only just remember that I can't change.  I back
+Mr. Levine to the limit.  And maybe he hasn't a surprise party coming
+for all of you!"
+
+"I don't care," insisted Lydia.  "I'm going to be happy to-night, and I
+won't talk Indians.  Oh, Kent, isn't Gustus getting good-looking?"
+
+"Too fat," replied Kent.  "He drinks too much beer.  And let me call
+your attention to something funny.  As you know, he's always had
+trouble getting in with the college set, because of the brewery.  But
+his father is the only well-to-do man in town who's had nothing to do
+with the reservation, so now, by contrast, brewing becomes a highly
+honorable business!  And Gustus goes with 'our very best families.'"
+
+Lydia chuckled, then said, "Margery is feeling much better.  She's at
+our house every Sunday.  You must come round and see her!"
+
+"Why shouldn't I come to see you, Lydia?" asked Kent, with a new note
+in his voice.
+
+"Why, of course, you'd see me, but Margery's always been the main
+attraction with you."
+
+"Has she?  Seems to me I recall a time when I couldn't endure the sight
+of her.  And when you were the best pal I had.  That's what you are,
+Lydia, a real pal.  A fellow can flirt round with the rest of 'em, but
+you're the one to look forward to spending a lifetime with!"
+
+Lydia drew a quick breath, then laughed a little uncertainly.  "You
+were the dearest boy!  Do you remember how you hated to wash your hands
+and that funny cotton cap you liked to wear with Goldenrod Flour
+printed across it?"
+
+"Of course, I remember.  And I remember how the fellows used to tease
+me about you.  I licked Gustus twice for it, when we were in the ward
+schools.  Lydia, let's go over those old trails together again.
+To-morrow's Sunday.  Let's take a walk down to the Willows in the
+afternoon."
+
+"All right, Kent," said Lydia, quietly, and silence fell on both of
+them till they drew up at the cottage gate.
+
+Kent lifted Lydia to the ground, held both of her hands, started to
+speak, then with a half inarticulate, "Thank you, Lydia, and good-by
+till to-morrow," he jumped into the little car and was gone.
+
+For some reason, when she woke the next morning, Lydia half hoped that
+the soft patter against her window was of rain drops.  But it was the
+wind-tossed maple leaves, whose scarlet and gold were drifting deep on
+the lawn and garden.  There never was a more brilliant October day than
+this, and at three o'clock, Lydia and Kent set off down the road to the
+Willows.
+
+Lizzie watched them from the living-room window.  "They're a handsome
+pair, Amos," she said.  "Now aren't they?"
+
+Amos looked up from his Sunday paper with a start.  "Those young ones
+aren't getting sentimental, are they, Liz?" he asked, sharply.
+
+"Well," returned Lizzie, "they might be, very naturally, seeing they're
+both young and good-looking.  For the land sake!  Don't you expect
+Lydia to find her young man and settle down?"
+
+"No, I don't!" snapped Amos.  "There isn't a man on earth good enough
+for Lydia.  I don't want her to marry.  I'll take care of her."
+
+"Humph!  Nothing selfish about a man, is there?" muttered Lizzie.
+
+Kent and Lydia strolled along the leafy road, with the tang of the
+autumn in their nostrils, and the blue gleam of the lake in their eyes.
+It was only a half mile to the Willows and as they turned in, Kent took
+Lydia's hand and drew it through his arm.
+
+"Look," he said, "I believe there is even a little left of our cave,
+after all this time.  What a rough little devil I was in those days.
+And yet, even then, Lyd, I believe I had an idea of trying to take care
+of you."
+
+"You were not a rough little devil!" exclaimed Lydia, indignantly.
+"You were a dear!  I can never forget what you did for me, when little
+Patience died."
+
+"I was a selfish brute in lots of ways afterward, though," said Kent,
+moodily.  "I didn't have sense enough to appreciate you, to
+realize--yet, I did in a way.  Remember our talks up at camp?  Then, of
+course, we never shall agree on the Indian question.  But what does
+that amount to?"
+
+Kent dropped Lydia's hand and faced her.  "Lydia, do you care for
+me--care for me enough to marry me?"
+
+Lydia turned pale.  Something in her heart began to sing.  Something in
+her brain began to stir, uncomfortably.
+
+"Oh, Kent," she began, breathlessly, then paused and the two looked
+deep into each other's eyes.
+
+"Lydia!  Lydia!!  I need you so!" cried Kent.  "You are such a dear,
+such a pal, so pretty, so sweet--and I need you so!  Won't you marry
+me, Lydia?"
+
+He seized both her hands and held them against his cheeks.
+
+"I've always loved you dearly, Kent, and yet," faltered Lydia, "and
+yet, somehow, I don't think we'd ever make each other happy."
+
+"Not make each other happy!  I'd like to know why not!  Just try me,
+Lydia!  Try me!"
+
+Kent's charming face was glowing.  Into Lydia's contralto voice crept
+the note that had belonged to little Patience's day.
+
+"I'd like to try you, dear if----  Wait, Kent, wait!  Let me have my
+playtime, Kent.  I've never had a real one, you know, till now.  Let me
+finish college, then ask me again, will you, Kent?"
+
+Kent jerked his head discontentedly.  "I think it would be better for
+us to tie to each other right now.  Please, Lydia dear!"
+
+Lydia shook her head slowly.  "Let me have my playtime, Kent.  I don't
+know that side of myself at all."
+
+Kent looked at the lake and at the little cave of long ago and back
+into the clear tender blue of Lydia's eyes.  Then he said softly, "All
+right, dear!  You know best.  But will you give me just one kiss,--for
+remembrance?"
+
+"Yes," replied Lydia, lifting her face, and Kent pulled off his cap and
+kissed the warm, girlish lips, tenderly, lingeringly, then, without a
+word, gently turned Lydia homeward.
+
+Kent's announcement that he had broken with Billy Norton did not amount
+to a great deal.  As winter came on, he and Billy met constantly at the
+cottage and outwardly at least, were friendly.  The commission finished
+its sitting and turned its findings over to Congress.  Congress
+instructed the District Attorney to carry the matter to the state
+courts.  When this had been done all the incriminated heaved a vast
+sigh of relief, and prepared to mark time.
+
+To tell the truth, Lydia was not giving a great deal of thought to
+weighty problems, this winter.  No girl who finds herself with two
+young men in love with her, can give much thought to the world outside
+her own.  Nor did the fact that Professor Willis made a point of
+appearing at the cottage at least once a month detract any from her
+general joy in life.
+
+She was doing well in her studies, though outside of the occasional hop
+she attended with Billy or Kent, she had no part in the college social
+life.  She was not altogether contented with the thought of preparing
+herself to teach.  The idea gave her no mental satisfaction.  She could
+not bring herself to believe that her real talents lay in that
+direction.  Yet, though this dissatisfaction grew as the days went on,
+it did not prevent her from taking a keen pleasure in the books she
+read and studied.
+
+She suddenly grew ashamed of her old E. P. Roe period and developed a
+great avidity for Kipling and Thomas Hardy, for Wordsworth and Stephen
+Phillips.  To her surprise she found that Billy was more familiar with
+these writers than she.  Kent read newspapers and nothing else.
+
+During all Lydia's Junior year, but one fly appeared in her ointment.
+And this, of course, was with, reference to clothes! that perennial
+haunting problem of Lydia's, which only a woman who has been motherless
+and poverty-stricken and pretty can fully appreciate.  The latter part
+of February, the great college social event of the year was to come,
+the Junior Prom.  Lydia felt sure that either Kent or Billy would ask
+her to go and for this the organdy would not do.  And for this she must
+have a party coat.
+
+Lydia knew if she took the matter up with Amos he would go out and
+borrow money for her.  She shuddered at the thought of this.  He had
+been so bitter about her fudge selling that she dared not broach the
+matter of money earning to him again.  Then she heard of the College
+Money Making Bureau.  She discovered that there were girls who were
+earning their way through college and that the Bureau was one of the
+quiet ways used by the University to help them.
+
+There was the Mending Department for example.  Here were brought every
+week by the well-to-do students piles of mending of every variety from
+heelless socks and stockings, to threadbare underwear and frayed cuffs
+and collars.  These were made into packages and farmed out to the money
+needing girls.  The Department was located in a room in the rear of the
+Chemical laboratory, and was in charge of the old janitor, whose casual
+manner was a balm to the pride of the most sensitive.
+
+Early in January, Lydia sneaked into the little room, and out again
+with a neat but heavy bundle.  She got home with it and smuggled it
+into her room without old Lizzie's seeing it.  Socks, wristbands and
+torn lace--there was fifty cents' worth of mending in the package!
+Lydia calculated that if she did a package a night for thirty nights,
+she would have enough money to buy the making of the party dress and
+cloak.
+
+The necessity for secrecy was what made the task arduous.  Lydia
+finished her studying as hurriedly as possible each night and went on
+to her room.  It was bitter cold in the room when the door was closed,
+but she hung a dust cloth over the keyhole, a shawl over the window
+shade, wrapped herself in a quilt and unwrapped the bundle.  By two
+o'clock she had finished and shivering and with aching eyes, crept into
+bed.
+
+Within a week she was going about her daily work with hollow eyes and
+without the usual glow in her cheeks.  Within two weeks, the casual
+glimpse of Lizzie darning one of Amos' socks gave her a sense of
+nausea, but she hung on with determination worthy of a better cause.
+
+The third week she took cold, an almost unheard-of proceeding for
+Lydia, and in spite of all old Lizzie's decoctions, she could not throw
+it off.  Amos insisted that Lizzie see her to bed each night with hot
+lemonade and hot water bottle.  Lydia protested miserably until she
+found that it was really more comfortable to mend in bed than it was to
+sit quilt-wrapped in a chair.  At the end of the fourth week she
+carried back her last bundle, and with fifteen dollars in her
+pocketbook, she boarded the street-car for home.  She was trembling
+with fatigue and fever.
+
+When she reached the cottage, she stretched out on the couch behind the
+old base burner with her sense of satisfaction dulled by her hard cough
+and the feverish taste in her mouth.  She was half asleep, half in a
+stupor when Billy came in.
+
+"How's the cold, Lyd?" he asked.
+
+"I got it," she murmured hoarsely.  "It'll be white mull and pink
+eider-down."
+
+"What did you say?" asked Billy, coming over to the couch and peering
+down at her, through the dusk.
+
+"Socks," whispered Lydia, "bushels of socks, aren't there, Billy?"
+
+Billy picked up her hand and felt her pulse, pulled the shawl up over
+her chest, put his cheek down against her forehead for a moment as he
+murmured, "Oh, Lydia, don't be sick!  I couldn't bear it!" then he
+hurried to the kitchen where Lizzie was getting supper.
+
+The next thing that Lydia knew she was in her own bed and "Doc" Fulton
+was taking the clinical thermometer from her mouth.  She was very much
+confused.
+
+"Where's my fifteen dollars?" she asked.
+
+"What fifteen dollars, little daughter?"  Amos was sitting on the edge
+of the bed, holding her hand.
+
+"For my party dress--white mull--with socks--please, Daddy."
+
+Amos looked at Lizzie.  "It's what she wanted for the Junior Prom, I
+guess," said the old lady, "poor child."
+
+"You shall have fifteen dollars, just as soon as you get well, honey,"
+said Amos.
+
+"All right," said Lydia, hoarsely, "tell Kent so's he--"  She trailed
+off again into stupor.
+
+It was a hard pull, a sharp, hard struggle with badly congested lungs,
+for two weeks.  It was the first real illness Lydia had had in all her
+sturdy young life.  Ma Norton took charge and "Doc" Fulton was there
+night after night.  Margery came every day, with a basket, for Elviry
+practically fed Amos during the two weeks.  Billy did chores.  Kent was
+errand boy with the little car.  And Adam sat on the doorstep for hours
+and howled!
+
+And all this time Lydia wandered in a world of her own, a world that
+those about her were utterly unable to picture through the erratic
+fragments of talk she uttered from time to time.  She talked to them of
+little Patience, of John Levine, of old Susie, She seemed to be blaming
+herself for the starving of an Indian baby who was confused in her mind
+with little Patience.  She sought her fifteen dollars through wild
+vicissitudes, until Amos found the little purse under the couch pillow
+and, wondering over its contents, put it in Lydia's feverish hands.
+Thereafter she talked of it no more.
+
+But Lydia was splendidly strong.  One night, after ten days of stupor
+and delirium, she opened her eyes on Amos' haggard face.  She spoke
+weakly but naturally.  "Hello, Dad!  Ask Margery to get me the pattern
+we were talking about.  In a day or so I'll be up and around."
+
+Amos began to cry for sheer joy.
+
+Once she began to mend, Lydia's recovery was unbelievably rapid.  On a
+Sunday, a week before the Junior Prom., she was able to dress and to
+lie on the living-room couch.  During the afternoon, Kent came in.  He
+had had one or two glimpses of the invalid before, but this was the
+first opportunity he'd had for a chat.
+
+"Hello, Lyd!" he cried.  "Are you going to go to the Junior Prom. with
+me, after all?"
+
+"Kent, I can't go.  I might be strong enough for one or two dances by
+that time, but I can't get my clothes done."
+
+"Pshaw, isn't that hard luck!" Kent's voice was soft with sympathy.
+"Never mind, old lady!  I'm so darned glad to have you getting well so
+fast, that the Prom. doesn't matter.  Say, Lyd, Margery's come out
+fine, since you've been sick!"
+
+"I know it," said Lydia.  "Just think of Margery carrying Dad's meals
+in a basket, and helping Lizzie with the dishes.  And I know she hates
+it worse than poison.  She's out in the kitchen now, making fudge."
+
+Kent brightened, perceptibly.  "Is she?  Er--Lydia, don't you think
+she'd go to the Prom. with me?  Seems to me she's cut out society as
+long as she needs to."
+
+Lydia buried her nose in a bunch of violets that Professor Willis had
+sent her.  "I think she ought to go if she wants to," she said.
+
+"Guess I'll ask her now," cried Kent, disappearing kitchenward.
+
+Lydia lay watching snowflakes sift softly past the window.  It was not
+long before Margery and Kent appeared.
+
+"She's going!" cried Kent.
+
+Margery's beautiful eyes were glowing.  "Yes, I'm going, Lyd!  And if
+nobody else will dance with me, Kent will take all the dances."
+
+Old Lizzie followed in.  She looked sharply at Lydia, then said, "You
+folks come out in the dining-room and let Lydia have a little nap."
+
+"No, I guess I'll go home," Margery answered, "Mother's not very well
+to-day."
+
+"I'll take you along in my chug-chug."  Kent crossed over to the couch
+and took Lydia's hand, while Margery went for her wraps.  "Good-by,
+dear," he whispered, "get well fast for me."
+
+Lydia smiled at him over the bunch of violets.
+
+Billy was the next caller.  "I left Dad and Amos saving the Nation
+through Free Trade," he said.  "Gee, Lydia, but you do look better!
+You don't suppose you could possibly go to the Prom., just for one or
+two dances, do you?"
+
+Lydia shook her head.  "No clothes," she said, briefly.  "Ask some
+other girl."
+
+"There isn't any other girl," replied Billy.  "If I can't go with you,
+I'll be hanged if I go at all!  Lydia, I don't see why a sensible girl
+like you lays such stress on clothes.  Honestly, it's not like you.
+Come on, be a sport and go in your usual dress."
+
+Lydia looked at Billy's steady gray eyes, and a faint glow of comfort
+began to surround her heart.  Sometimes she felt as if Billy understood
+her almost as well as John Levine did.
+
+"Now, look here," he said, argumentatively, "you and I had better talk
+this clothes question out, once and for all."
+
+Lydia giggled.  "Billy, you don't know women!  It can't be talked out!"
+
+"I know you," replied the young man, stretching out his long legs to
+the base-burner, and looking at Lydia, "and I want you to stop worrying
+about your duds.  I want you to let me lend you the money to get a
+complete party outfit with."
+
+"Billy Norton, you know I wouldn't borrow money from a man!" exclaimed
+Lydia.
+
+"Well, then, I'll give it to Mother and you borrow it from her."
+
+"Of course, I won't," replied Lydia.  "Besides, I've got enough money I
+earned myself!"
+
+"You have!  Then what's all the worry about?  How'd you earn it, Lyd?
+I thought your father--"
+
+Lydia dug the little pocketbook from under the sofa pillow and spread
+the money proudly on her shawl.  "There it is and it's the root of all
+my troubles."
+
+Billy looked at her suspiciously.  "Young woman, how'd you earn that
+money?" he demanded.
+
+"Socks!  Bushels of socks, mostly," answered Lydia with a chuckle that
+ended in a groan.  She looked at Billy whimsically and then as the
+sureness of his understanding came to her again, she told him the story
+of her little midnight sweatshop.
+
+"Oh, dearest!" Billy burst forth with a groan when she had finished,
+"how could you be such a little idiot!  Oh, Lydia, Lydia, I can't tell
+you how you wring my heart."
+
+It seemed for a moment as if he must gather the slight little figure to
+his heart, but he set his teeth.
+
+"If that darned Prom. means as much as that to you--" he began, but
+Lydia interrupted him.
+
+"It doesn't any more, Billy.  I've learned a lot of things since I've
+been sick.  I was a little idiot to work so hard for clothes!  But I
+don't think it was all clothes.  I wanted to be like other girls.  I
+wanted to have the man that took me proud of my appearance."
+
+She paused and Billy would have spoken, but Lydia began again.
+
+"You see, I was never sick before, so I never realized that a sickness
+is a serious thing in more ways than one.  I mean you can't go down to
+death's door and ever be quite the same afterward.  I've been thinking
+about myself a great deal.  Billy, and I'm feeling pretty small.  Isn't
+it queer how hard it is to learn just the simplest things about living!
+Seems as though I learn everything with my elbows."
+
+The two young people sat in silence, Lydia watching the snowflakes
+settle on the already overladen boughs of the pine.  Billy watching the
+sensitive lines in Lydia's face change with each passing thought.
+
+"I've made up my mind," Lydia began again, "that I've been poor too
+long, ever really to outgrow the effects of poverty.  I suppose I'd
+always worry about money, even if I were taken suddenly rich!  Anyhow,
+lots of nice people have liked me poor and I'm just not going to worry
+about having lovely clothes, with soft colors and--and graceful lines,
+any more.  I'm going to take care of our lovely old mahogany furniture
+and try to make the cottage an attractive place for people with brains.
+After all, the real thinkers of the country were poor--Emerson and his
+circle, how simply they lived!  You see, Billy, if I clutter up my mind
+with furniture and clothes, I won't have time to think."
+
+Lizzie came in at this moment with a bowl of broth.  "I'll hold it for
+you, Lydia," said Billy.  "Never mind pulling the little table up,
+Lizzie, she's too weak to fuss with a table."
+
+There was a remote twinkle in Lizzie's old eyes, but she gave the bowl
+over to Billy, and tactfully withdrew to the kitchen, where she sat
+down with her feet in the oven.  "Drat Kent!" she said to herself.
+
+Billy moved over to sit on the edge of the couch, and Lydia began to
+sip the broth, spoonful by spoonful.  "It's such fun to be weak and a
+little helpless and have people waiting on you," she said.  "It's the
+first time it ever happened to me."
+
+As she spoke she was thinking how Billy had improved.  How immaculate
+he was and how well his blue suit fitted him.  There was no barnyard
+odor about him now!  Only a whiff of the good cigars he smoked.
+
+"Billy," she said, "what would you say if next year I took the short
+course in agriculture?"
+
+Billy almost dropped the bowl.  "I'd be speechless!" he exclaimed.
+
+"I hate to think of teaching," Lydia went on, "and I'm crazy about the
+country and farming and so is Dad.  And there's more than that to it."
+
+What more there was to it, she did not say then, for Ma Norton came
+bustling in.  She made no comment on Billy's posing as a table!  Ma was
+wise and she was almost as devoted to Lydia as Billy himself.
+
+"It's nice to see the pink coming back in your cheeks, Lydia," she
+said.  "I just ran over to say I was going into town to do some
+shopping, early in the morning, and if there was anything I could do
+for you--?"
+
+"No, thank you," said Lydia.  "I've begun to save up now to buy a cow!"
+
+And Ma looked on with a puzzled smile as Lydia and Billy burst into
+sudden shrieks of laughter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE END OF A GREAT SEARCH
+
+
+"Abiding love!  Those humans who know it, become an essential part of
+nature's scheme."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+Lydia returned to her college work the Monday after the Junior Prom, a
+little thinner, and her color not quite so bright as usual, but in a
+most cheerful frame of mind.  She was feeling, somehow, a new sense of
+maturity and contentment.  Even tales of the wonders of the Prom did
+not disturb her much.  She made up her lost classroom work, then took
+on an extra course in English Essayists with Professor Willis, just to
+satisfy her general sense of superiority to the ordinary temptations
+that should have disturbed a young female with fifteen idle dollars in
+her pocket!
+
+Kent was devoting a good deal of attention to Lydia but this did not
+prevent his taking Margery about.  He was, he explained to Lydia, so
+sorry for her!
+
+"You don't have to explain to me," protested Lydia.  "I want you to go
+with all the girls you like.  I intend to see all I want of as many men
+as care to see me.  I told you this was my playtime."
+
+Kent's reply to this was a non-committal grunt.
+
+It was late in May that he told Lydia what John Levine had finally
+accomplished, in his silent months of work in Washington.  The morning
+after he told Lydia, Lake City was ringing with the news.  The Indians
+on the reservation were to be removed bodily to a reservation in the
+Southwest.  The reservation was then to be thrown open to white
+settlement.
+
+"What will poor Charlie Jackson say?" were Lydia's first words.
+
+Kent shrugged his shoulders.  "Poor old scout!  He'll have to make a
+new start in the West.  But isn't it glorious news, Lyd!  The land
+reverts to the Government and the Land Office opens it, just as in
+pioneer days.  Everybody who's title's in question now can reenter
+under settlement laws.  Isn't Levine a wizard!  Why don't you say
+something, Lydia?"
+
+"I don't know what to say," said Lydia.  "I'm sick at heart for the
+Indians.  But I'm glad that the awful temptation of the pines is going
+to be taken away from Lake City.  Though how good can come out of a
+wrong, I'm not sure.  I don't understand Mr. Levine.  Oh, dear!  It's
+all wrong.  When do the Indians go?"
+
+"The last of June.  It's funny, Lydia, that you don't have more
+sympathy with my work," replied Kent, gloomily.
+
+"Oh, Kent!" cried Lydia, "I want to believe that everything you do is
+right but something's the matter with my mind, I seem to have to decide
+matters of right and wrong for myself.  When will Mr. Levine come home?"
+
+"Next month.  Well, there's one consolation.  You've always been crazy
+about Levine and you don't approve of him, either."
+
+Lydia flushed.  "Oh, I don't say that I don't approve of him.  I just
+don't understand him.  Maybe he really believes the end justifies the
+means."
+
+"Huh!  Isn't that just what I believe?" demanded Kent.  He looked at
+her so happily, his boyish eyes so appealing, his square chin so
+belligerent, that Lydia suddenly laughed and gave his ear a tweak.
+
+"Poor old vanity!  Did he want all the ladies to adore him?  Well, they
+do, so cheer up!"
+
+Kent grinned.  "Lyd, you're a goose and a good old pal!  Hang it, I'm
+glad you've got brain enough to stick to your own opinions!"
+
+On a Sunday afternoon, late in June, John Levine turned in at the gate
+as casually as though he had left but the day before.  Lydia was
+inspecting the garden with her father, when she heard Adam bark and
+whine a welcome to some one.
+
+"Oh, there he is, Daddy!" she cried, and she dashed down the rows of
+young peas, her white skirts fluttering, both hands extended.
+
+John seized her hands and for a moment the two stood smiling and
+looking into each other's face.  Except that he was grayer, Levine was
+unchanged.  He broke the silence to say, "Well!  Well! young Lydia, you
+are grown up.  I don't see how you manage to look so grown up, when
+your face remains unchanged."
+
+"It's my hair," said Lydia, "and my skirts."
+
+"Of course," growled Amos, "I realize that I count only as Lydia's
+father.  Still I think you ought to recognize me, anyhow."
+
+The two men clasped hands.  "Well, Amos?"
+
+"It's been a long time between drinks, John."
+
+"I know it, Amos, but my chore's done.  Now, I'll stay home and enjoy
+life.  Lydia, is it too hot for waffles and coffee, for supper?  Lord,
+I've dreamed of those old days and of this meeting for nine months."
+
+"It's not too hot for anything on earth you can ask for," returned
+Lydia, beginning to roll up her sleeves.  "I'll go right in and start
+them now."
+
+John looked after her, at the lengthened skirts, at the gold braids
+wrapped round her head.  "She doesn't change except in size, thank
+God," he said.
+
+"Oh, she gets prettier," said Amos, carelessly.  "She's sort of grown
+up to her mouth, and the way she wears her hair shows the fine set of
+her head.  She's improved a lot."
+
+"She has _not_!  Amos, you never did appreciate her.  She couldn't be
+any more charming now than she was as a kiddie."
+
+Amos put an affectionate hand on his friend's shoulder.  "You always
+were an old fool, John.  Come up and peel your coat, then take a look
+at the garden.  There's Lizzie, dying to speak to you."
+
+Levine looked around the living-room, complacently.  "Jove, isn't it
+fine!  Most homelike place in America.  Lydia's been fixing up the old
+mahogany, eh?"
+
+"Yes!  One of the professors told her it was O. K., so she got a book
+out of the library on old furniture and now we are contented and
+strictly up to date.  These damned rugs though, I can't get her to tack
+'em down.  They're just like so many rags on the floor!  I never had a
+chance to tell you what she did to my mahogany arm chair, did I?"
+
+He retailed the story of Willis' first call and John roared though he
+murmured, "Poor kiddie," as he did so.
+
+"She's given me over to my sins, though, lately," Amos went on, with
+the faint twinkle in his eyes that Lydia had inherited.  "She brought
+me up by hand, for a long time, hid my pipes, wanted me to manicure my
+nails, wouldn't let me eat in my shirt sleeves or drink my coffee out
+of the saucer.  But her friend, Willis, likes me, as is,--so she's let
+me backslide without a murmur."
+
+Amos paused and looked out at the shimmering lake.  "John, I wish I had
+five daughters.  There's nothing like 'em in the world."
+
+Levine did not answer for a moment, while his gaze followed Amos' out
+over the familiar outline of blue water and far green hills.
+
+"Sometimes, Amos," he muttered, finally, "I feel as if my whole life
+had been wasted."
+
+It was an extraordinarily pleasant supper.  John and Amos, in their
+shirt sleeves, ate waffles till Lydia declared that both the batter and
+her strength were exhausted.  Indians were not mentioned.  Levine was
+in a reminiscent mood and told stories of his boyhood on a Northern
+Vermont farm and old Lizzie for the first time in Lydia's remembrance
+told of some of the beaux she had had when her father was the richest
+farmer round Lake City.
+
+After the dishes were washed, Levine asked Lydia to stroll up the road
+with him while Amos did his evening chores.  It was dusk when they
+turned out the gate to the road, Lydia clinging to John's arm.  A June
+dusk, with the fresh smell of the lake mingling with the heavy scent of
+syringa and alder bloom, and of all the world of leafage at the high
+tide of freshness.  June dusk, with the steady croak of frogs from the
+meadows and the faint call of whippoorwills from the woods.
+
+John put a long, hard hand over the small thin one on his arm.  "Have
+you missed me, young Lydia?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she answered, "especially as you never came near us after the
+hearing."
+
+"How could I come?" asked the man, simply.  "You had weighed me and
+found me wanting.  There was nothing for me to do but to go ahead and
+finish my job, as I still saw the right of it.  Have you forgiven me,
+Lydia?"
+
+"It wasn't a matter between you and me," replied the girl, slowly.  "It
+was between you and your conscience and if your conscience approves,
+what's the use of asking me to forgive you?"
+
+"Because, I can't stand not having your approval," said Levine.
+
+They strolled on in silence, while Lydia considered her reply.  "No
+matter if the destroying of the Indians were right, that wouldn't
+exonerate the whites for having been cruel and crooked in doing it.
+People will always remember it of us."
+
+Levine gave a laugh that had no mirth in it.  "Lord, who'll say the New
+England spirit is dead!  You're as cold in judging me as one of your
+ancestors was when he sentenced a witch to be burned."
+
+"Oh, no!" cried Lydia.  "Dear John Levine, I couldn't be cold to you.
+Nothing could make me love you less.  And you yourself told me to be
+true to myself."
+
+John sighed, then said abruptly, "Let's never discuss it again.  What
+are you reading now, Lydia?"
+
+"English essayists and Emerson.  I'm crazy about Emerson.  He seems so
+much more human than Leigh Hunt and De Quincey and the rest of them.
+Maybe it's because he's an American, so I understand him better.  I
+think I like Compensation and Friendship the best so far.  I learned
+one thing from Friendship to quote to you.  It's like you and me."
+
+With both hands clasping his arm, her sweet face upturned to his in the
+dusk, and with the rich notes in her voice that were reminiscent of
+little Patience, she quoted:
+
+"'Friendship--that select and sacred relationship that is a kind of
+absolute and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and
+common so much is this purer; and nothing is so much divine.'"
+
+John stopped and taking Lydia's face in both his hands, he exclaimed
+huskily.  "Oh, my dear, this is my real welcome home!  Oh, Lydia,
+Lydia, if you were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"
+
+Lydia laughed.  "Then we'd travel--to all the happy places of the
+world.  We must turn back.  Daddy'll be waiting."
+
+Levine turned obediently, saying as he did so, "Just one thing more,
+then the year's absence will be spanned.  How does the Great Search go
+on?  Do you ever have bad dreams at night, now?"
+
+"Sometimes," replied Lydia.  "Just the other night I woke up with the
+old fear and then--it was very curious--I heard the lap-lapping of the
+lake, and the little murmur of the wind in the pine and the frogs
+cheeping and the steady chirp of the crickets, and, Mr. Levine, the
+queerest sense of comfort came to me.  I can't put it into words.
+Somehow it was as if Something behind all those little voices spoke to
+me and told me things were--were right."
+
+"Lydia," said Levine, quickly, "you've struck the right trail.  I'll
+follow it with you.  What a long way you've come alone, little girl.
+Give me your hand, dear.  I like to feel it on my arm.  Oh, Lydia!
+Lydia!"
+
+"What are you two mooning about," said Amos' voice, as he loomed on
+them through the dusk.
+
+"Enterprises of great pith and moment," replied Levine.  "Got any
+tobacco with you, Amos?"
+
+"No!  We'd better go in the house, anyhow.  The mosquitoes will eat us
+up.  Lydia, Margery's looking for you."
+
+And as far as Lydia was concerned, the evening was ended.
+
+Levine was very busy with the details of the Indian removal for the
+next week or two.  The exodus was accomplished in a business-like
+manner.  A steady line of busses brought the Indians from the
+reservation to the outskirts of Lake City, where rough barracks had
+been erected to care for the government wards while they were being
+concentrated.  The state militia was on guard here, at intervals along
+the road and upon the reservation.  There were some disturbances on the
+reservation, but for the most part, the Indians were dazed and
+unprotesting.  Before the concentration began, the precaution was taken
+of sending Charlie Jackson under guard to the new reservation in the
+Southwest.  Lydia had never seen him after her day at the hearing.  She
+always was to carry in her memory, his handsome bronze face, too early
+marked with lines of despair, as she saw it while she uttered her
+protest to the commissioners.  And it was a hauntingly sad memory to
+carry.
+
+She went with Billy to see the embarking of the Indians in the special
+trains provided for them.  The streets along the line of march were
+lined with whites, silent but triumphant.  It was a beautiful day,
+clear and hot.  Two by two, the Indians moved along the fine old
+elm-shadowed streets, old Wolf at the head, shambling and decrepit, but
+with his splendid old head held high.  Two by two, in utter silence,
+their moccasined feet soundless, old Indians in buckskins, and young
+Indians in store clothes, then squaws, in calico "mother-hubbards,"
+great bundles strapped to their backs, and children in their arms or
+clinging to their skirts.  A long, slow moving line, in a silence that
+even the children did not break.
+
+It took until well in the evening to get the pathetic exiles into the
+trains.  Lydia did not stay after dark.  Profoundly depressed, she made
+Billy take her home.
+
+In the evening she sat with her Emerson open before her, but with her
+unseeing eyes fastened on the open door.  It was a little after nine
+when the chug-chug of Kent's car stopped at the gate and in a moment
+Kent, white faced, appeared in the door.
+
+"John Levine's been shot.  He wants Lydia!"
+
+Without a sound Lydia started after Kent down the path, Amos following.
+Kent packed them into the little car and started back toward town at
+breakneck speed.
+
+"How bad off is he?" asked Amos.
+
+"Can't live," answered Kent.
+
+Still Lydia made no sound though Amos held her firmly in the vain
+attempt to still her trembling.
+
+"How'd it happen?"  Amos' voice broke a little.
+
+"That damned sister of Charlie Jackson and old Susie both took a shot
+at him, just as the last car-load was finished.  The police and the
+militia got 'em right off.  Shot 'em all to pieces.  It looked as
+though there'd be a wholesale fight for a minute but the militia closed
+in and the last train got off."
+
+"Where is John?" asked Amos.
+
+"In Doc Fulton's office.  They can't move him."
+
+No one spoke again.  Kent brought the automobile up with a bang before
+the doctor's house and Lydia, followed closely by the two men, ran up
+to the door, through the outer office to the inner, where a nurse and
+Doc Fulton stood beside a cot.
+
+Levine lay with his face turned toward the door.  When he saw Lydia he
+smiled faintly.  She was quite calm, except for her trembling.  She
+walked quickly to his side and took his hand.
+
+"Looks like I was going to start traveling alone, young Lydia," he said
+feebly.  "I just wanted to tell you--that Great Search--is ending all
+right--don't worry--"
+
+"I won't," said Lydia.
+
+"Only I hate to go alone--my mother--gimme something, Doc."
+
+The doctor held a glass to his lips.  After a moment, Levine said
+again, "My mother used to hold me--" his voice trailed off and Lydia
+said suddenly, "You mean you want me to comfort you like I used to
+comfort little Patience?"
+
+"Yes!  Yes!" whispered Levine.  "It's going to sleep alone I----
+Mother--"
+
+Lydia knelt and sliding her arm under Levine's neck, she pulled his
+head over gently to rest on her shoulder.  Then she began with infinite
+softness the little songs she had not uttered for so many years.
+
+  "'Wreathe me no gaudy chaplet;
+  Make it from simple flowers
+  Plucked from the lowly valleys
+  After the summer showers.'"
+
+  "'Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea . . .'"
+
+  "'I've reached the land of corn and wine
+  And all its riches surely mine.
+  I've reached that heavenly, shining shore
+  My heaven, my home, for evermore.'"
+
+Suddenly the nurse shifted John's head and Doc Fulton lifted Lydia to
+her feet.  "Take her home, Amos," he said.
+
+John Levine had finished the Great Search.
+
+
+Curiously enough, nothing could have done so much toward reinstating
+Lake City in the good opinion of the country at large as did Levine's
+tragic death.  There was felt to be a divine justice in the manner of
+his taking off that partook largely of the nature of atonement.  He had
+led the whites in the despoiling of the Indians.  For this the Indians
+had killed him.
+
+That a white life extinguished for a tribe destroyed might not be full
+compensation in the eyes of that Larger Justice which, after all, rules
+the Universe, did not seriously influence the reaction of public
+opinion toward thinking better of Lake City.  And John Levine, known in
+life as an Indian Graft politician, became in his death a Statesman of
+far vision.
+
+Levine's will was not found at first.  Distant cousins in Vermont would
+be his heirs, if indeed after his estate was settled, it was found that
+there was left anything to inherit.
+
+Kent for a month or so after the tragedy was extremely busy helping to
+disentangle Levine's complicated real estate holdings.  It was found
+that he held heavily mortgaged second growth timber lands in the
+northern part of the State and Kent spent a month superintending a
+re-survey of them.  He was very much broken up by Levine's death, and
+welcomed the heavy work.
+
+In spite of Lydia's deep affection for Levine, she did not feel his
+death as much as Amos did.  For after all, Lydia was young, gloriously
+young, and with a forward-turned face.  Amos had lost in John his only
+real friend, the only human being who in some ways had helped to fill
+in the hopeless gap left by his wife's death.  And Amos, though still a
+young man, kept his face turned backward.
+
+After her first wild grief had expended itself, Lydia found that, after
+all, Levine's tragic death had not surprised her.  She realized that
+ever since she had known Charlie Jackson, she had been vaguely haunted
+by a fear of just such an ending.
+
+July slipped into a breathless, dusty August.  Lydia worked very hard,
+making herself tasks when necessary work was done.  She put up fruit.
+She worked in the garden.  She took up the dining-room carpet and oiled
+the floor and made rugs.  After she had had her swim in the late
+afternoon, she would take up her old position on the front doorstep, to
+sew or read or to dream with her eyes on the pine.
+
+How silently, how broodingly it had stood there, month in, month out,
+year after year!  What did it feel, Lydia wondered, now that the
+Indians were gone?  Was it glad that Levine had been punished?
+
+Billy, trundling up the dusty road from the law office on his bicycle,
+late each afternoon, would stop for a moment or two.  Since the
+tragedy, not a day had gone by that Lydia had not seen him.
+
+"The drought is something frightful," he said to Lydia one afternoon in
+late August, wiping the sweat and dust from his face.  "This is the
+ninth week without rain.  The corn is ruined.  I never knew anything
+like this and Dad says he hasn't either."
+
+"Our garden died weeks ago," said Lydia, listlessly.
+
+Billy looked at her keenly.  "Are you feeling any more cheerful, Lyd?"
+
+Lydia turned her gaze from the burning brown meadows to Billy's tanned,
+rugged face.
+
+"I shall always have a gap in my life, where he went out," she said,
+slowly.  "I shall never get over missing him.  Oh, he was so dear to
+me!  And yet, Billy, it isn't at all like little Patience's death.  He
+didn't depend on me and I didn't live with him so that everything
+doesn't cry his absence to me.  And I've got more resources than I had
+then--"
+
+She laid her hand on the open book in her lap.
+
+"What're you reading?" asked Billy.
+
+"Emerson--Compensation.  Listen, Billy--'We cannot part with our
+friends.  We cannot let our angels go.  We do not see that they only go
+out that archangels may come in.'
+
+"And so," Lydia's voice trembled, but she went on bravely, "I'm trying
+to understand--trying to see how I can make something good come out of
+his poor lost life.  Somehow I feel as if that were my job.  And--and
+the idea helps me.  Oh, my dear John Levine!"
+
+Billy cleared his throat.  "Let's see that passage, Lyd."  He took the
+book and read on: "'The death of a dear friend--wife, lover,
+brother--terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth that was waiting to
+be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation or style of living and allows
+the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.'"
+
+The two young people sat staring at the distant hills.
+
+"Don't you see," Lydia burst out, "that I've got to do something, be
+something, to make all the loss and trouble of my life worth while?"
+
+"I understand," answered Billy.  "What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm not quite sure, yet," replied Lydia, "but I'll tell you as soon as
+I've made up my mind.  Billy, ask your father to come over this
+evening.  Dad is so desperately blue."
+
+Billy rose to go.  "One thing I will tell you, Billy," Lydia went on,
+"I'm going to take the short dairy course this winter, besides my other
+work."
+
+Billy looked at the sweet, resolute face curiously, then he chuckled.
+
+"Whenever you deign to unravel the workings of the mystery you call
+your mind, I'll be crazy to listen," he said.
+
+Early in September, John Levine's will was found.  He had left his
+entire property, unconditionally, to Lydia.
+
+Amos, at first, was frantic with delight.  Lydia was appalled.
+
+"All my life," she half sobbed to her father, "I've been fighting to
+get away from Indian lands.  And Mr. Levine knew how I felt.  Oh, how
+could he do this to me!"
+
+"Don't talk like a fool, Lydia!" roared Amos.
+
+Lydia turned to Kent, who was sitting on the back steps with them.  He
+leaned over and patted her hand.
+
+"Why worry about it, Lyd?  Your father and I'll look out for it all."
+
+"Do I _have_ to keep it?" asked Lydia, tensely.  "Will the law make me?"
+
+"I should say not!  You can give it to me, if you want to," laughed
+Kent.
+
+"But don't you see how I feel?" cried Lydia.  "Don't you see that all
+John Levine's lands up there are haunted by death--his own--and all the
+starving Indians?  Oh, why did he do this to me!"
+
+"I suppose you feel the same way about the cottage," said Amos,
+sarcastically.
+
+"I don't either," contradicted Lydia.  "I'm as happy as I can be that
+we've got that.  But all the rest!  I won't have it, I tell you!  I'd
+rather be poverty stricken all my life."
+
+"Well, don't worry too much about that," said Kent.  "Dave Marshall
+thinks there won't be anything left after the estate is settled, but
+the Indian lands."
+
+"Oh, Kent, you aren't having anything to do with Dave Marshall, are
+you?" exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Kent flushed a little.  "Well, his advice can't hurt me.  If it's bad,
+I don't have to take it.  You ought to go out and see his farm, Lydia.
+They're getting the house all fitted with modern conveniences.  Dave's
+going to make a model stock farm."
+
+"Bought with money earned by the Last Chance!" said Lydia.
+
+"You can't be so darned squeamish about where a man gets his money
+these days, Lyd.  Of course, there was no excuse for the Last Chance.
+But Dave's done what he could about it."
+
+Lydia made no reply and Kent looked at her quizzically.  "A New England
+conscience must be something awful to own, eh, Lyd?"
+
+Lydia chuckled.  "It's pretty bad," she admitted, then she went on
+soberly, "but I won't take those Indian lands."
+
+"You can give them to me," reiterated Kent, cheerfully.
+
+"She'll keep them," said Amos, shortly, "or Lydia and I'll have our
+first real row."
+
+"Well, save up the fight till the estate's settled," said Kent,
+soothingly.  "And then you'll know what you're fighting about.  That
+will take some months."
+
+Lydia sighed with relief.  And again Kent laughed.  "Oh, Lyd!  You
+haven't any idea how funny you are!  Come to, old lady!  This is the
+twentieth century!  And twentieth century business ethics don't belong
+to town meeting days.  The best fellow gets the boodle!"
+
+"Then Dave Marshall is the best fellow in our community, I suppose,"
+said Lydia.
+
+"Oh, Gee, Lyd!  After all, he's Margery's father!"
+
+Lydia looked at Kent thoughtfully.  Since the day under the willows, he
+had not made love to her, yet she had the feeling that Kent was devoted
+to her and she wondered sometimes why he liked to spend as much time
+with Margery as with herself.  Then she gave herself a mental shake.
+
+"I'm going to tell you right now, that until I _have_ to I'm not going
+to worry.  I'm going to try to be happy in my senior year."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+CAP AND GOWN
+
+
+"Nature never pretends.  She gives her secrets only to the
+unpretending."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+The fifteen dollars, after all, were disposed of in a highly
+satisfactory manner.  They paid for Lydia's senior cap and gown.
+Perhaps there were other members of the class to whom their senior
+insignia meant as much as they did to Lydia, but that is to be doubted.
+
+Although, ever since her illness, she had firmly resolved never to
+worry again over her meager wardrobe, she almost wept with joy when she
+first beheld herself in cap and gown.  For she looked exactly like
+other girls!  It didn't matter at all, this year, whether or not she
+had a new suit or a new overcoat.  The gown was all-concealing.
+Donning it was like turning from caterpillar to butterfly with a single
+wave of the hand.
+
+Amos and Lizzie were as much impressed as Lydia, but for different
+reasons.  Lizzie was sure that the gown was proof and evidence that
+Lydia had compassed all human knowledge.
+
+"Land, Lydia," she murmured, walking slowly around the slender figure,
+"it makes you look terrible dignified and I'm glad of that.  No one
+could look at you now and not feel that you know an awful lot."
+
+Amos was unimpressed by Lydia's stores of wisdom but it seemed to him
+that there never was such a lovely face as that which looked out at him
+from under the mortar-board cap.  There was a depth to the clear blue
+eyes, a sweetness to the red lips, that moved him so that for a moment
+he could not speak.
+
+"It's an awful pretty idea, wearing the cap and gown, isn't it!" he
+said, finally.  "Somewhere, back East, there's a picture of one of your
+ancestors who taught in an English college.  You look something like
+him."
+
+"Did I have that kind of an ancestor?" asked Lydia with interest.
+"Isn't it too bad that we Americans don't know anything about our
+forebears.  I wonder what the old duck would say if he could see me!"
+
+It was the rainiest Fall within Lydia's recollection.  It seemed, after
+the drought was once broken, as if nature would never leave off trying
+to compensate for the burning summer.  The dark weather had a very
+depressing effect on Amos and instead of growing more resigned to his
+friend's death, he seemed to Lydia to become daily more morose and
+irritable.
+
+In a way, Lydia's conscience smote her.  She knew that her father was
+worrying over her attitude on her inheritance, but she continued to
+avoid the issue with him while the estate was being settled.  Lydia was
+doing heavy work in college.  She actually had entered all the classes
+in dairying possible, while carrying her other college work.  And she
+enjoyed the new work amazingly.
+
+She had not mentioned her purpose to any one of her friends but Billy.
+Therefore when Professor Willis, showing some Eastern visitors through
+the dairy building, came upon her washing cream bottles one afternoon,
+he was rendered entirely speechless for a moment.
+
+Lydia, in a huge white dairy apron and cap, was sluicing the bottles
+happily, the only girl in a class of a dozen men, when Willis came in,
+followed by two tall men in eyeglasses.
+
+"Queer, I admit, to find this sort of thing in a college," he was
+saying, "but decidedly interesting, nevertheless.  Well, Miss Dudley,
+are you--I didn't know--I beg your pardon."
+
+The class, which was working without an instructor, looked up in
+astonishment.  Lydia blushed furiously and the two visitors looked on
+with obvious interest.
+
+"It's a class in bottle sterilizing," she explained.  "It just happens
+to be my turn."
+
+The look of relief on Willis' face made Lydia angry.  She turned her
+back on him and proceeded to let a cloud of steam envelop her and her
+bottles.
+
+"The idiot!  He thought I was dish-washing for a living, I suppose,"
+she murmured to herself.  "What business is it of his, anyhow?"
+
+How Willis got rid of his two guests, he did not say, but half an hour
+later, when Lydia emerged from the dairy building, he was waiting for
+her.  There was a quiet drizzle of rain, as was usual this Fall, and
+Lydia was wearing her old coat, with her mortar-board.  But it was
+clear that the professor of Shakespeare did not know what she wore.  It
+was a half mile through the University farm to the street-car and he
+wanted to re-establish himself with Lydia before some other swain
+appeared.
+
+"Tell me what this means, Miss Dudley!" he said eagerly as he raised
+his umbrella to hold it carefully over the mortar-board.
+
+"It looks as though it meant rain, to me," replied Lydia, shortly.
+
+Willis gave a little gasp.  "Oh!  I beg your pardon!"
+
+His chagrin made Lydia ashamed of herself.  "I don't see why you should
+be so shocked at my trying to learn something useful," she said.
+
+"Oh, but I'm not!  Nothing that you could do would shock me!  You've
+got a good reason, for you're the most sensible girl I ever met.  And
+that's what I'm keen about, the reason."
+
+"The reason?" Lydia stared at the dripping woodland through which they
+were making their way.  "I'm not just sure I had a reason.  I don't
+want to teach.  I do love farming.  I don't see why a woman can't learn
+dairy work as well as a man."
+
+"You're the only girl doing it, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, but what difference does that make?  The boys are fine to me."
+
+"I don't know that that surprises me any," Willis smiled down at the
+pink profile at his shoulder.  "Well, and then what?"
+
+"Then a dairy farm, if Dad and I can rent the makings of one."
+
+"But you have plenty of land, haven't you?  Levine left all his
+property to you, I understand."
+
+Lydia looked quickly up into Willis' face.  "If you were I would you
+keep that property?"
+
+The professor's eyes widened.  "I?  Oh!  I don't know.  It would be an
+awful temptation, I'm afraid."
+
+"I'd rather be poor all my life," said Lydia.  "I'm not afraid of
+poverty.  I've lived with it always and I know it's a sheep in wolf's
+clothing."
+
+"You mean you've got the courage to give the pine land up?" asked
+Willis, quickly.
+
+"It isn't courage.  It's being afraid of my conscience.  I--I feel as
+if I were finishing out John Levine's life for him--doing what he ought
+to have done."
+
+"I wonder if you have any idea what you mean to me!" Willis suddenly
+burst forth.  "You embody for me all the things my puritan grandmothers
+stood for.  By Jove, if the New England men have failed, perhaps the
+Western women will renew their spirit."
+
+Lydia flushed.  "I--I wish you wouldn't talk that way," she protested.
+"I'm not really wise nor very good.  I just feel my way along--and
+there's no one to advise me."
+
+"That's the penalty of growing up, my dear," said Willis.  "We no
+longer have any one to tell us what to do.  Here comes your car.  I'm
+afraid I let the umbrella drip on your cap."
+
+"It doesn't matter," said Lydia, valiantly.
+
+"Miss Dudley--" as he signaled the car, "I'm coming to see you, just as
+often as you'll let me, this winter," and he walked off before Lydia
+could reply.  She sank into a car seat, her cheeks burning, her heart
+thudding.
+
+Early in December, the settlement of the Levine estate was completed.
+John's method of "shoestringing" his property was disastrous as far as
+the size of Lydia's heritage went.  Her father tried to make her
+understand the statement of the Second National Bank, which was acting
+as executor.  And as nearly as Lydia could understand, one portion of
+the estate was used to pay up the indebtedness of another portion,
+until all that was left was the cottage, with a mortgage on it, and
+three hundred and twenty acres of land on the reservation.
+
+The three hundred and twenty acres on the reservation was under a
+cloud.  Part of it was land he had gotten from Charlie's sister.  All
+of it he had obtained from alleged full bloods.
+
+"Then," said Lydia, in a relieved manner, "I really haven't any Indian
+lands at all!"
+
+"Oh, yes, you have," replied Amos.  "The court will take the oath of a
+number of people that the land was obtained from mixed bloods.  Dave
+Marshall has fixed that up."
+
+"Dave Marshall!" gasped Lydia.
+
+Amos nodded.  "He's strong with the Whiskey Trust.  And the Whiskey
+Trust is extra strong wherever there's a reservation."
+
+"Oh, Daddy!" cried Lydia, "we can't take it?  Don't you see we can't?"
+
+It was just after supper and they were in the familiar old living-room.
+Adam was snoring with his head under the base burner, and Lizzie was
+clattering the dishes in the kitchen.  Amos stood by the table, filling
+his pipe, and Lydia with her pile of text books had prepared for her
+evening of study.  Amos' work-blunted fingers trembled as he tamped the
+tobacco into the bowl and Lydia knew that the long dreaded battle was
+on.
+
+"I can't understand why you act so like a fool," began Amos,
+querulously.  "And I can't see why you set your judgment up as better
+than mine.  I swan--even your Mother never did that, except on
+borrowing money."
+
+"It isn't judgment.  It's conviction, Daddy.  And John Levine told me
+to stand by my own convictions, even when they were against his.  Oh,
+how can you be willing to take land stolen in the first place and then
+the theft legalized by the Whiskey Trust!  Why, you don't want me even
+to speak to Dave Marshall now, yet you're willing to take this dirty
+favor from him."
+
+"We won't keep the land.  We'll sell it and have the money to clear up
+the mortgage on the cottage.  I'd take a favor from the devil in hell
+to get this place clear," replied Amos slowly.  He took a turn up and
+down the room.  "I can't see what's happened to children nowadays.  In
+my day we obeyed.  Lydia, I'm not going to discuss this any longer.
+_You've got to take that land_."
+
+Lydia sat with her thin hands clasped before her on the table, her
+clear eyes fastened on her father's face.
+
+"I'm not a child, Daddy," she said in a low voice, "I'm a woman, grown.
+And if you'd wanted me to grow up without any convictions, you should
+have given me different ancestors and then you shouldn't have brought
+me up in a town like Lake City."
+
+Amos looked down at his daughter grimly.  The Daniel Webster picture in
+its black carved frame was just behind him and the somber vision in the
+living and the pictured eyes was identical.
+
+"Can't you see what a fool you are!" he shouted.  "The land can never
+go back to the Indians.  John took good care of that.  If you don't
+take it, somebody else will.  Can't you see!"
+
+Lydia's lips tightened.  "That's not the point.  It's the way we're
+getting it and the way John Levine got it."
+
+"And yet you pretended that you loved and admired Levine!" sneered Amos.
+
+Lydia sprang to her feet.  She was white to her lips.  "Don't repeat
+that remark," she said in a choked voice.  "What do you know about the
+feeling John Levine and I had for each other?  He was the one friend of
+my life."
+
+"Nice way you have of showing it, now he's gone," roared Amos.  "Just
+about the way you show your affection for me.  Will nothing satisfy
+you?  Norton and I never squealed when you and Billy got our claims
+taken away from us.  Doesn't it occur to you it's about time you
+sacrificed something to me!"
+
+Lydia had never seen her father so angry before.  He had often worked
+himself into a tantrum on the subject of money but there was an aspect
+to his anger now that was new to her.  She was trembling but cool.
+
+"I'll do anything you want but this, Dad," she said.
+
+"But this is all I want.  It's what I've wanted for years, this little
+bit of land.  And you haven't any idea what that feeling is."
+
+Like a flash Lydia saw again long aisles of pines, smelled again the
+odor of the needles, heard again the murmuring call of the wind.
+
+"Good God!" cried Amos, tossing his pipe on the table, "poverty's
+hounded me all my life--poverty and death.  The only two people who
+cared about me, Patience and Levine're gone.  Yet here's the chance for
+me to be independent.  Here's a chance for me to make up for the
+failure I've made of life.  A man with a little piece of property like
+this and a little bank account is somebody in the community.  What do I
+care how I get it, as long's I can hold it?  What's a lot of dirty
+Indians to stand between me and my future?  But what do you care?"
+
+"O Daddy!  O Daddy!  How can you talk so to me!" groaned Lydia.  She
+put her hands over her eyes for a moment, swallowed a sob and then
+started for the outer door.  She caught her coat from the nail and
+closed the door behind her.
+
+An irresistible impulse had carried her from the house.  She wanted to
+see Billy.  It was still early and a lantern flickered in the Norton
+barnyard.  She ran along the snowy road and down the drive of the
+Norton yard, pausing beside a lilac bush to see whether it was Billy or
+his father just entering the cowshed.  It was Billy and she ran across
+the barnyard to the shed door.  Billy was whistling to himself as he
+began to bed down the cattle for the night.  Lydia looked at him
+eagerly in the dim light.  How big and strong he was!
+
+"Billy!" she said, softly.
+
+The young man dropped his pitchfork and came toward her.  "What's the
+matter, Lydia!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Dad and I've been having an awful quarrel."
+
+"About the land?" asked Billy quickly.
+
+Lydia nodded.  "Oh, I don't know what to do!"  And then, not having
+meant to do so at all, she suddenly began to cry.
+
+"Why can't they let you alone, damn 'em!" exclaimed Billy, furiously.
+"Come away from that cold doorway, dear."  And he led her into the warm
+stable and over to a harness box.  "There," pulling her down beside him
+on the box, and putting his arm about her, "don't cry, Lydia.  I can't
+stand it.  I'm liable to go over and say things to your father and
+Kent."
+
+There was an edge to his voice as he said this that vaguely alarmed
+Lydia.  She wiped her eyes.
+
+"Kent wasn't there," she said.
+
+"No, but he's behind your father in this.  I'll tell 'em both,
+sometime, what I think of their bullying you this way."
+
+"Kent hasn't bullied me," insisted Lydia.
+
+"No?  Well, give him time!  Poor little girl!  Don't tremble so.  You
+don't have to talk any more about it to any one.  Just send 'em to me."
+
+Lydia smiled through her tears.  "I can't send my own father to you.
+And you and Kent would come to blows."
+
+"We probably would," replied Billy.  "Want my hanky or haven't you wept
+yours full yet?"
+
+"I'm not going to cry any more," said Lydia, raising her head.  Billy
+still held her warmly in the circle of his arm.  The stable was dim and
+quiet and fragrant with clover.  "You're such a comfort, Billy.  Now
+that John Levine's gone, there's no one understands me as you do.  How
+can I reconcile Dad to giving up the land?"
+
+"You can't, Lydia.  You'll just have to reconcile yourself to a
+misunderstanding with him."
+
+"But I can't live that way!" wailed Lydia.
+
+"Well, you have the cottage.  He used to think he'd be perfectly happy
+if he owned that."
+
+"Oh, there's a mortgage on the cottage!" exclaimed Lydia.  "Poor Daddy!
+He wants to pay the mortgage with the lands."
+
+"It's tough luck!  But there's nothing for you to do, Lydia, but to
+stick to it.  Don't weaken and things will come out all right.  See if
+they don't.  And you've always got me.  And if I see they're worrying
+you too much, I'll make trouble for 'em."
+
+A vague, warm sense of comfort and protection was stilling Lydia's
+trembling.  She rose and looked up into his face gratefully.  "I don't
+see why you're so good to me," she said.
+
+"Do you want me to tell you?" began the young man eagerly.
+
+"No!  No!" Lydia began to move hastily toward the door.  "Don't come
+home with me, Billy.  I'll just run back alone."
+
+Billy's face in the lantern light was inscrutable.  "I'll obey
+to-night, Lydia," he said, "but the time's coming, when I won't," and
+he picked up the pitchfork he had dropped.
+
+With the sense of comfort and protection sustaining her, Lydia went
+homeward under the winter stars.  Kent's automobile was standing before
+the gate and Lydia's heart sank.  It was the first time in her life she
+ever had been sorry at the thought of seeing Kent.
+
+He was sitting before the base burner with her father and jumped up to
+help her take her coat off.  He greeted her soberly.
+
+"Your father's been telling me about your discussion, Lyd," he said.
+"You can't mean to stick by your decision!"
+
+Lydia sat down wearily.  "Oh, Kent, don't _you_ begin at me, too."
+
+"But I think I ought to, Lydia," replied Kent, his voice dangerously
+eager.  "I don't think any of your friends have a right to be quiet
+when you're letting a silly scruple ruin your and your father's future."
+
+"It certainly won't ruin my future," said Lydia.  "And I won't let it
+ruin Dad's."
+
+"Now look here, Lydia," began Kent, "let's begin at the beginning and
+sift this thing out."
+
+"But why?" groaned Lydia.  "You know exactly how I feel and why I feel
+it.  And I know how you feel.  We've been debating it for years."
+
+"Yes, but listen," persisted Kent, and once more he began his arguments
+on the Indian question.
+
+Kent had a certain eloquence of speech, yet Lydia, knowing all that he
+would say, gave little heed to his words while she watched his glowing
+face.
+
+"Don't you see?" he ended finally.
+
+"I see how you feel, yes," replied Lydia.  "But just because you can
+list what you call average American business deals that are crooked,
+you aren't justified in being crooked, are you?"
+
+Kent threw out his hand helplessly, and for a moment there was stance
+in the room, then he said,
+
+"Well, after all, there's nothing so selfish as your Puritans.  Of
+course, every one but yourselves is wrong.  And, of course, it doesn't
+occur to you that it might be a decent thing of you to sacrifice your
+own scruples to do a thing that would mean so much to your father."
+
+Lydia looked at Kent quickly.  This was a new angle.  He would have
+followed this opening at once had not Amos spoken for the first time.
+
+"Hold up, Kent," he said in a tired voice.  "Don't heckle her any more.
+After all, I'm getting on toward fifty and I guess it's too late for me
+to begin over, anyhow.  I'll plod along as I always have."
+
+"Oh, Daddy!" cried Lydia, "don't talk that way!  You aren't a bit old.
+You make me feel like a beast, between you."
+
+"Well, we don't mean to," Amos went on, "but I guess we have been
+pretty hard on you."
+
+Amos' weariness and gentleness moved Lydia as no threats could.  Her
+eyes filled with tears and she crossed over quickly to the window and
+looked out on the starlit splendor of the lake.  In how many, many
+crises of her life she had gazed on this self-same scene and found
+decision and comfort there!
+
+Was she selfish?  Was she putting her own desire for an easy conscience
+ahead of her father's happiness?  Amos went into the kitchen for a
+drink and Kent followed her to the window and took both her hands.
+
+"Lydia," he said, "I'm awful sorry to press you so, but you're being
+unfair and foolish, honestly you are.  You used to let me look out for
+you in the old days--the old days when I used to pull little Patience's
+carriage with my bicycle--why can't you trust me now?  Come,
+dearest,--and next year we'll be married and live happy ever after."
+
+Lydia's lips quivered.  All Kent's charm of manhood, all the memories
+of their childhood together, of his boyhood love for her and her baby
+sister, spoke together to win her to his desires.  And after all, what
+could matter so much to her as her father's and Kent's happiness?
+
+"Kent!" she cried with the breathlessness of a new idea, "if I should
+give in and agree to take the land, would you go up there with me and
+turn it into a farm?"
+
+Kent smiled at her pityingly.  "Why, Lyd, there's nothing in that!  Why
+should we try to farm it?  The money is in speculating with it.  I
+could clear up a mint of money for you in a couple of years, if you'll
+give me the handling of it."
+
+But Lydia's eyes were shining now.  "Oh, but listen!  You don't
+understand.  Mr. Levine drove the Indians out, by fraud and murder.
+Yes, he did, Kent.  And yet, he had big dreams about it.  He must have
+had.  He was that kind of a man.  And if we should go up there and turn
+those acres into a great farm, and--and make it stand for something big
+and right--perhaps that would make up for everything!"
+
+"Lord, what a dreamer you are, Lyd," groaned Kent.  "Mr. Dudley, do you
+hear this?"
+
+Amos grunted.  "Nothing looks good to me but this cottage.  I'd have a
+cow and a few pigs and some bees and the whole world could go to the
+devil for all of me."
+
+"Lydia," said Kent, "be sensible.  Don't talk impossibilities."
+
+"What is there impossible about it?" demanded Lydia.
+
+"Gee, easy money on one side, and a lifetime of hard work on the other!
+Yet you act as if there was a choice."
+
+"Kent, can't you understand how I feel?" pleaded Lydia.  "Have you got
+a blind spot in your mind where money is concerned?  Are all the men in
+America money crazy like the men in Lake City?"
+
+"Sure," replied Kent cheerfully.  "Oh, Lydia, honey, don't be so hard!
+Look at your poor old Dad!  Think what it would mean to him.  Don't be
+so doggone sanctimonious!"
+
+Instead of looking at her father, Lydia looked at Kent, long and
+wistfully.  How dear he was to her!  What an inalienable part of her
+life he was!  What was the use of always struggling against her heart.
+Kent smiled into her face.  Her lips trembled and she turned to look at
+Amos.  He was standing by the table, filling his pipe.  Suddenly Lydia
+realized how gray and broken he looked, how bent his shoulders were
+with work, and there swept over her anew an understanding of his utter
+loneliness since her mother's and Levine's death.
+
+With a little inarticulate murmur, she ran across the room and threw
+her arms about his neck.  "Oh, Daddy," she cried, "I'll do it!  I'll
+agree to it!  If only you'll promise me to be happy!"
+
+Amos dropped his pipe.  "Lydia!  You don't mean it!  Why, my little
+girl!  Lord, Kent!  Isn't she just all right!  Make me happy!  Why,
+Lydia, you've made a young man of me--I swan--!"
+
+Kent was holding one hand now, Amos the other.  Both looked at Lydia
+with radiant faces.  And she could but feel an answering glow.
+
+"We'll make this up to you, Lyd, old lady," cried Kent.  "See if we
+don't."  There was a little pause during which the ice boomed.  Then,
+
+"Well, what happens next, now you've settled me?" asked Lydia.
+
+"Something to eat," exclaimed Amos.  "I didn't eat any supper.  I swear
+I haven't eaten for months with any relish.  Lydia, make us some
+chocolate or something."
+
+As Lydia passed through the dining-room with her steaming tray, a
+little later, Lizzie called from her bed and Lydia set down the tray
+and went to her.
+
+"Did they win you over, Lydia?" she asked.  "I went to bed so's not to
+interrupt."
+
+"Yes, they won me," said Lydia.
+
+"Poor child!  I never wished harder'n I have tonight that your mother
+hadn't died.  But never mind!  I guess it's just as well you gave in.
+Kent could win the heart of a bronze image.  Drat him!  Run along with
+the supper, Lydia."
+
+"Now," said Kent, as he sipped his chocolate, "let's lay our plans."
+
+"Not before me," exclaimed Lydia.  "My one stipulation is that you
+don't tell me any of the details."
+
+"All right," said Amos, hastily.  "We'll do anything she wants, now,
+eh, Kent?"
+
+"You bet," replied the young man.
+
+That night, after Kent had gone, Lydia stood long at the living-room
+window which gave on the front gate.  The pine, its boughs powdered
+with snow, kept its lonely vigil over the cottage.
+
+"Yes," whispered Lydia, finally, "your last friend has deserted you,
+but I guess I'm keeping faith with Kent and Dad, anyhow."
+
+Then she went to bed.
+
+For a day or so Lydia avoided Billy Norton.  But she was restless and
+unhappy and found it difficult to keep her mind on her college work.
+Finally, she timed her return from the dairy school, one afternoon, to
+coincide with Billy's home-coming from his office and she overtook him
+Just beyond the end of the street-car line.  The sun was sinking and
+the wind was rising.
+
+"Billy!" called Lydia.
+
+He turned and waited for her with a broad smile.
+
+"Billy," she said without preliminaries, "I gave in!"
+
+"_Lydia_!" he gasped.
+
+"I couldn't stand their pleading.  I gave in.  I hate myself, but Dad
+looks ten years younger!"
+
+"You actually mean you're letting yourself get mixed up with the
+Whiskey Trust and that pup of a Dave Marshall?"
+
+Lydia plodded doggedly through the snow.  "Of course, Kent's tending to
+all that, I refuse to be told the details."
+
+"Lydia!" cried Billy again and there was such a note of pain in his
+voice that she turned her face to his with the same dogged look in her
+eyes that had been expressed in her walk.
+
+"Why," he said, "what am I going to do without you to look up to--to
+live up to?  You can't mean it!"
+
+"But I do mean it.  I fought and fought and I have for years till I'm
+sick of it.  Now, at least, there'll be no more poverty for Dad to
+complain of."
+
+  "'Just for a handful of silver he left us,
+  Just for a ribband to wear in his coat,'"
+
+quoted Billy bitterly.  "Lydia, I can't believe it!"
+
+"It's true," repeated Lydia.  "I couldn't stand Kent and Dad both.  And
+partly I did it for John Levine's memory.  I'm not trying to justify
+myself Billy.  I know that I'm doing something wrong, but I've
+definitely made up my mind to sacrifice my own ease of conscience to
+Dad's happiness."
+
+"You can't do it!  You aren't built that way," exclaimed Billy.
+
+"But I _am_ doing it," reiterated Lydia.
+
+"Look here," he cried, eagerly, "do you expect to keep my respect and
+yet go on with this?"
+
+Lydia did not reply for some time.  They were nearing the cottage, and
+she could see the pine, black against the afterglow, when she said,
+
+"Well, I'm not keeping my own self-respect and yet, I'm glad I'm making
+Dad and Kent happy."
+
+"Kent!  Wait till I see him!"
+
+"You can't change Kent, if I couldn't," replied Lydia.
+
+"I'll not try to change him," said Billy grimly.  "I'll tell him what I
+think of him, though."
+
+They paused by the gate.  Billy looked down at Lydia with a puzzled
+frown.
+
+"How about 'Ducit Amor Patriae' now, Lydia?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she sighed.  "Good night, Billy."
+
+"Good-by, Lydia," said the young man heavily and he turned away,
+leaving her standing at the gate.
+
+But though she had maintained a calm front with Billy, Lydia went over
+and over their conversation that night feverishly before she went to
+sleep.  She tossed and turned and then long after the old livingroom
+clock had struck midnight, she slipped out of bed and crouched on her
+knees, her hands clasped across her pillow, her eyes on the quiet stars
+that glowed through the window.
+
+"O God," she prayed, "O God, if You do exist, help me now!  Don't let
+me lose Billy's respect for I don't know how I can get along without
+it.  God!  God!  Make me believe in You, for I must have Some One to
+turn to!  You have taken mother and little Patience and John Levine
+from me!  Oh, let me keep Billy!  Let me keep him, God, and make me
+strong enough to keep on accepting that three hundred and twenty acres.
+Amen."
+
+Shivering, but somehow quieted, she crept into bed and fell asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE YOUNGEST SCHOLAR
+
+
+"The Indians knew no home, and so they died."--_The Murmuring Pine_.
+
+
+If Amos was not happy after Lydia's concession, at least she never had
+seen him so interested in life as he was now.  Nor had Kent ever been
+more considerate of Lydia.  They went to a number of dances and skated
+together frequently in spite of the fact that Kent was very busy with
+his real estate work.
+
+All this, Lydia told herself, should have made her happy, and yet, she
+was not.  Even when Professor Willis took her to a Military hop and
+brought her home in a hack, she was conscious of the feverish sense of
+loss and uncertainty that had become a part of her daily living.
+Several times she had an almost overwhelming desire to tell him what
+she had done.  But she could not bear to destroy the ideal she knew he
+had of her, even for the relief of receiving his sympathy, of which she
+was very sure.
+
+Billy came to see her as usual, and took her to an occasional dance.
+But he was not the friend of old.  And the change was not in any
+neglect of things done, it was in his way of looking at her; in his
+long silences when he studied her face with a grieved, puzzled look
+that made her frantic; in his ceasing to talk over his work with her
+with any air of comradeship, and most of all in his ceasing to bully
+her--that inalienable earmark of the attitude of the lover toward the
+beloved.
+
+Lydia's nerves began to feel the strain before spring came in.  She was
+pale in the morning and fever-flushed in the afternoon and her hands
+were uncertain.  March was long and bleak, that year, but April came in
+as sweetly as a silver bugle call.  The first week in April the ice
+went out of the lake with a crash and boom and mighty upheaval, leaving
+a pellucid calm of blue waters that brought a new light to Lydia's
+face.  She heard the first robin call on her way home from college, the
+day that the ice went out.
+
+She had walked up the road ahead of Billy, her black scholar's gown
+fluttering.  Once, he would have run to overtake her, but now he
+plodded along a block behind, without a sound.  Lydia did not pause at
+the cottage gate.  The call of the robin was in her blood and she swung
+on up the road, past the Norton place, and into the woods.
+
+Young April was there, with its silence a-tip-toe, and its warmth and
+chill.  Lydia drew a deep breath and paused where through the trunks of
+the white birches she caught the glimmer of the lake.  There was a log
+at hand and she sat down, threw her mortar-board on the ground and
+rested, chin cupped in her hands, lips parted, eyes tear dimmed.  She
+was weary of thought.  She only knew that the spiritual rightness with
+which she had sustained her mind and body through all the hard years of
+her youth, had gone wrong.  She only knew that a loneliness of soul she
+could not seem to endure was robbing her of a youth that as yet she had
+scarcely tasted.
+
+She sat without stirring.  The blue of the lake began to turn orange.
+The robin's note grew fainter.  Suddenly there was the sound of hasty
+footsteps through the dead leaves.  Lydia looked up.  Billy was
+striding toward her.  She did not speak, nor did he.  It seemed to her
+that she never had noticed before how mature Billy's face was in its
+new gauntness, nor how deep and direct was his gaze.
+
+He strode up to the log, stooped, and drew Lydia to her feet.  Then he
+lifted her, scholar's gown and all, in his arms and kissed her full on
+the lips, kissed her long and passionately, then looked deep into her
+eyes and held her to him until she could feel his heart beating full
+and quick.
+
+For just a moment, Lydia did not stir, then she threw her arms around
+his neck, hid her face against his shoulder and clung to him with an
+intensity that made him tremble.
+
+The robin's note grew sweeter, fainter.  The lake lap-lapped beyond the
+birches.  Billy slipped his hand under Lydia's cheek and turned her
+face so that he could look into her eyes.  At what he saw there, his
+own firm lips quivered.
+
+"Lydia!" he whispered.
+
+Then he kissed her again.
+
+Lydia freed herself from his arms, though he kept both of her hands in
+his.
+
+"Now," he said gently, with a smile of a quality Lydia never had seen
+on his lips before, "now, sweetheart, are you going to be good?"
+
+"Yes," murmured Lydia, with the contralto lilt in her voice.  "What do
+you want me to do.  Billy?"
+
+"I want what you want, dearest.  I want the old Lydia with the vision.
+Has she come back, or shall I have to look for her again?"
+
+He started as if to take Lydia in his arms once more, but with a sudden
+rich little laugh, she stepped away from him.
+
+"She's here--Oh, Billy, _dearest_!  How could you let her wander around
+alone so long."
+
+"It didn't hurt my cause any for her to miss me," answered Billy,
+grimly, "though I didn't realize that till a moment ago.  Stop your
+trembling, Lydia.  I'm here to look out for you, for the rest of time."
+
+"I can hear Adam barking," said Lydia.  "Dad must have come home.  Take
+me back, Billy."
+
+"All right," replied Billy.  "I will just as soon as you tell me
+something."
+
+Lydia looked up into his face.  "Not that just yet, please, Billy.  I
+must make things right with Dad and Kent."
+
+Billy seized her shoulders.  "Is there anything between you and Kent,
+Lydia?" he said, jealously.
+
+"Not in words," she answered, "but of course he's gone ahead with my
+land deal, with the idea he'd share in it."
+
+Billy's hands tightened on her shoulders.  "Dear," Lydia went on
+pleadingly, "don't spoil this perfect moment.  We must have this,
+always, no matter what comes."
+
+"Nothing can come," replied Billy sternly.  "Give me your hand, little
+girl.  It's getting cold in these woods."
+
+They walked back to the cottage in silence, hand in hand.  They paused
+at the gate and Lydia pointed through the dusk at the new moon.
+
+"Let's wish on it," she said.  "Close your eyes, and wish."
+
+Billy closed his eyes.  A kiss as soft as the robin's note fell on his
+lips and the gate clicked.  He opened his eyes and stood looking up the
+path long after the door closed, his hat in his hand.
+
+Lydia wandered into the dining-room quite casually.
+
+"For heaven's sake, Lydia!" cried Amos.  "I was just going to start on
+a hunt for you!"
+
+"I took a walk in the woods," explained Lydia, "and was gone longer
+than I realized."
+
+"Supper's ready.  Sit right down," said Lizzie, looking at Lydia,
+intently.
+
+Amos was absorbed in his own thoughts during the meal.  He and Kent had
+both been worried and absent minded, lately.  He paid no heed to the
+fact that Lydia only played with her food and that during the meal she
+smiled at nothing.  But old Lizzie, who had worried herself half sick
+over Lydia, watched her with growing curiosity.
+
+"Seen Kent, to-day, Lydia?" she asked.
+
+After a moment--"Did you speak to me, Lizzie?" Lydia inquired.
+
+"Yes, I did.  I asked if you'd seen Kent to-day."
+
+"I?  No, I haven't seen Kent.  We had a quiz in chemistry, to-day."
+
+"What's that got to do with anything?" grunted Lizzie.  But she asked
+no more questions.
+
+Ma Norton came over during the evening to borrow some yeast.  Amos was
+working over some figures on a bit of paper.  Lydia was sitting with a
+text book in front of her.  She had not turned a leaf in twenty
+minutes, to Lizzie's actual count.
+
+"Spring's here," said Ma.  "Though there's still a bite in the air.
+Not that Billy seems to notice it.  I found him sitting on the front
+steps with his cigar, as if it was June."
+
+Lizzie gave Lydia a quick look and wondered if she only imagined that
+her cheeks were turning pinker.
+
+"I can't sit down," Ma went on, "I've got to set this sponge to rise."
+
+"I'll walk home with you, Mrs. Norton," said Lydia, suddenly.  "It
+seems as if one couldn't get enough of this first spring day."
+
+"Do!"  Ma's voice was always extra cordial when she spoke to Lydia.
+
+Lizzie watched the door close behind the two.  "I knew it," she
+exclaimed.
+
+"Knew what?" inquired Amos, looking up from his figures.
+
+"That there was a new moon," answered the old lady, shortly, trudging
+off to her bedroom.
+
+"Liz is getting childish," thought Amos, returning to his work.
+
+"Bill's still on the front porch," said Ma Norton as they reached the
+Norton driveway.  "Do go speak to him, Lydia.  He's amiable to-night,
+but he's been like a bear for months."
+
+Billy's mother went on into the kitchen entrance and Lydia went over to
+the dim figure on the steps.
+
+"Your mother told me to speak to you," she said meekly.
+
+"I heard her."  Billy gave a low laugh.  "Come up here in the shadow,
+sweetheart, and tell me if you ever saw such a moonlit and starlit
+night."
+
+But Lydia did not stir.  "Honestly, I don't dare look at the sky any
+longer.  I have a quiz in rhetoric to-morrow and I've _got_ to get my
+mind on it."
+
+Billy came down the steps.  "Then I'll walk home with you."
+
+"No, you won't.  I--I just came over to see if it's all real.  Just to
+touch you and then run back.  I'd rather you didn't walk back with me."
+
+The night was brilliant and Billy, responding to some little
+petitioning note in Lydia's voice, did not offer to touch her but stood
+looking down at the sweet dim face turned up to his.  She lifted her
+hand, that thin hand with the work calluses on it, and ran it over his
+cheeks, brushed her cheek against his shoulder, and then ran away.
+
+She finished her studying and went to bed early, only to lie awake for
+hours.  At last, she crept out of bed and as once before, she clasped
+her hands and lifted her face to the heavens.  "Thank you, God!" she
+whispered.  Then she went to sleep.
+
+The next night, Kent came out to the cottage.  Lydia dreaded his coming
+so little that she was surprised.  Yet this day had been one of
+continual surprise to her.  She had wakened to a dawn of robin songs,
+and had dressed with an answering song in her own heart.  She was as
+one who had never known sorrow or anxiety.  Her whole future lay before
+her, a clear and unobstructed pathway.
+
+For Lydia had found herself.  She was a creature to whom a great love
+and devotion were essential as motive forces.  In turn she had given
+this, in childish form, to her mother, to little Patience and to
+Levine.  One by one these had been taken from her and she had struggled
+to give this devotion to Kent, but she could not give where there was
+no understanding.
+
+And now she saw that for years it had been Billy.  Billy who combined
+all the best of what her mother, her baby sister, and Levine had meant
+to her, with something greatly more--the divinity of passion--a thing
+she could not understand, yet that had created a new world for her.
+
+Kent tossed his hat on the couch and shook his head at Amos.  "Dave's
+not going to get away with it.  He's got some kind of a row going with
+the Whiskey people and he says we might as well count him out.  I don't
+know what to do now."
+
+Amos groaned.  "Lord, what luck!"
+
+"Don't let it worry you," said Lydia calmly.  "I made up my mind to-day
+that I'd go ahead and enter on that land just as other folks are doing,
+in the good old way.  I'm going to make a farm up there, that will blot
+out all memory of what Mr. Levine did.  But I'm going to work for it as
+a homesteader has to and not take any advantage through Mr. Levine's
+graft."
+
+Kent looked up crossly.  "Oh, Lydia, for heaven's sake, don't begin
+that again!"
+
+Lydia crossed the room and put her hand on Kent's shoulder as he sat on
+the couch.
+
+"Kent, look at me," she said, then, very quietly, "I'm going to
+homestead that land."  There was no escaping the note of finality in
+her decision.
+
+Kent's face whitened.  He looked up steadily at Lydia.  Amos and Lizzie
+sensed that they were spectators of a deeper crisis than they
+understood and they watched breathlessly.  Kent rose slowly.  The sweat
+stood on his forehead.
+
+"You know what that means, as far as I'm concerned," he said.
+
+Lydia, chin up, gaze never more clearly blue, nodded.
+
+"Yes, Kent, but we never would have been happy.  You and Margery were
+meant for each other, anyhow."
+
+"Lydia!  Lydia!" exclaimed Kent hoarsely, half angrily, half pleadingly.
+
+"No, you won't feel badly, when you think it over.  Go to Margery now
+and tell her, Kent."
+
+Kent picked up his cap.  "I--I don't understand," he said.  Then,
+angrily, "You aren't treating me right, Lydia.  I'll talk to you when
+I'm not so sore," and he walked out of the house.
+
+Lydia turned to Amos and Lizzie.  "There," she said, happily, "I've got
+Kent settled for life!"
+
+Amos sank into his armchair.  "Lydia, have you lost your mind!" he
+groaned.
+
+"No, I've found it, Daddy.  Poor Dad, don't look as if you'd fathered a
+lunatic!"
+
+Amos shook his head.
+
+"Daddy, let's homestead that land!  Let's quit this idea of getting
+something by graft.  Let's do like our forefathers did.  Let's
+homestead that land!  Let's earn it by farming it."
+
+Lydia's father looked at her, long and meditatively.  He was pretty
+well discouraged about the probability of ever getting a clear title to
+the land through Kent or Marshall.  And the longer he looked at Lydia,
+the more his mind reverted to New England, to old tales of the farm on
+which he and his ancestors had been bred.
+
+"A man with three hundred and twenty acres of land is a power in the
+community," he said, suddenly.
+
+"Oh, yes, Dad!" cried Lydia.
+
+"You never know what a feeling of independence is," said Lizzie, "till
+you own land and raise wheat."
+
+Amos stared out the door into the darkness.  Little by little Lydia saw
+creeping into his face new lines of determination, a new sort of pride
+that the thought of the selling of the lands had not put there.  He
+cleared his throat.
+
+"Hang it, Lydia, I'm not as hard as you think I am.  I want you to be
+happy.  And I'm not so damned old as you think I am.  I'm good for
+homesteading, if you and Liz are.  A farmer with three hundred and
+twenty acres!  God!"
+
+Lydia nodded.  Amos began to walk the floor.  "I'm still a young man.
+If I had the backing that land gives a man, I could clean out a lot of
+rottenness in the State.  Even if I only did it by showing what a man
+with a clean record could make of himself."
+
+"That's just the point," cried Lydia eagerly, "and your record wouldn't
+have been clean, if you'd gotten it through Marshall."
+
+"What young men need nowadays," Amos went on, "is to get back to the
+old idea of land ownership.  Three hundred and twenty acres!  Lydia,
+why can't I enter on it to-morrow?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Lydia.
+
+"If I take Brown's offer for the cottage, it would leave us enough to
+get a team and I bet I could hire a tractor to get to the cleared
+portion of it, this Fall.  A hundred acres are clear, you know.  I
+might as well quit the factory now, eh, Lydia?"
+
+With a laugh that had a sob in it, Lydia kissed her father and whirled
+out the door.  Billy was coming in at the gate.  She flew down to seize
+his hand and turn him toward the road.
+
+"Let's walk!  I've such quantities to tell you!"
+
+Billy turned obediently, but paused in the shadow of the pine.  "Lydia,
+I can't tell you what it means to me.  No matter what bigger things may
+seem to happen to me, nothing can equal the things I've felt and
+dreamed to-day."
+
+Then he put his arms about Lydia and kissed her, and she put her arms
+about his neck and laid her head against his shoulder.  They stood thus
+motionless while the pine whispered above them.  And in the intensity
+of that embrace all the griefs of Lydia's life were hallowed and made
+purposeful.
+
+"Lydia," said Billy, "I want to tell Mother and Dad.  Will you come
+over home with me, now?"
+
+"Yes," replied Lydia, "and then we must tell my father and Lizzie.  Oh,
+Billy, I forgot," as they started down the road, "I've decided to
+homestead that land."
+
+"But--why, Lydia dear, you're going to be a lawyer's wife.  For
+heaven's sake, let that beastly land go."
+
+"No, I'm going to be a pioneer's wife!"
+
+There was a little pause, then Billy laughed uncertainly.  "Well, I'm
+not going to talk about it to-night.  I'm in a frame of mind to-night
+where I'd promise you to be an Indian chief if you ask it.  Mother and
+Dad are in the kitchen."
+
+They opened the kitchen door and stepped in.  Pa Norton was sitting in
+his stocking feet, reading the evening paper.  Ma was putting away the
+day's baking.  She paused with a loaf of bread in her hand as the two
+came in and Pa looked over his glasses.
+
+"Mother and Dad," said Billy, uncertainly, "I--I've brought Lydia home
+to you!  Look at her, Dad!  Isn't she a peach!"
+
+Lydia stood with her back against the door, cheeks scarlet, golden head
+held high, but her lips quivering.
+
+Ma dropped her loaf of bread.  "Oh, Lydia," she cried, "I thought that
+numskull of a Billy never would see daylight!  I've prayed for this for
+years.  Come straight over here to your mother, love."
+
+But Pa Norton had dropped his paper when Ma dropped her bread and had
+not paused for comments.  He made three strides to Lydia, and gave her
+a great hug and a kiss.  Then he said, "First time I saw you carrying
+that milk for Billy's books, I said, there's the wife Billy ought to
+have.  Ma, wasn't she the dearest--"
+
+But Ma shoved him aside contemptuously.  "Get over and talk to Billy.
+This is a woman's affair.  Who cares about reminiscences now.  Oh,
+Billy, do you remember I used to worry because she didn't keep the back
+of her neck clean!"
+
+"Who's reminiscencing now?" asked Pa belligerently.
+
+Everybody laughed.  Then Pa sighed.  "Well, I feel almost reconciled
+now to Bill's giving up farming.  When're you going to be married?"
+
+Lydia blushed.  "Oh, not for a long time.  Now, let's go and tell my
+people, Billy."
+
+Out in the night again!  Curious how long the short walk to the cottage
+could be made!  Curious how near the stars were--heaven just over the
+road where the lovers strolled.  Not strange that such ecstasy cannot
+last forever.  The human mind could not bear that heaven-born rapture
+too long.
+
+Lizzie was mending.  Amos was sitting in his arm chair, with a bit of
+paper on which he was figuring.  Lydia flew across the room and dropped
+on her knees beside him.
+
+"Oh, Daddy dear, look at me!  Billy's here and he's always going to be
+here.  Tell us you're glad."
+
+Amos looked up with a jerk.  First at Billy standing stalwart and grave
+by the table, his deep eyes as steady as the hand he held out to
+Lizzie.  Then at his daughter, with her transformed face.
+
+"But," protested Amos, "I thought it was to be Kent."
+
+"Oh, it couldn't have been Kent," exclaimed Lydia.  "We never would
+have understood each other.  Kent was for Margery."
+
+A frown gathered on Amos' face.  He did not really want Lydia to marry
+any one.  All that had reconciled him to the thought of Kent had been
+Kent's relation to the Indian lands.  And now, he discovered that he
+didn't want to give his daughter to any one.  He threw a jealous arm
+about her.
+
+"No, you can't have her, Billy," he said.  "Nobody shall have her.
+She's too good for the best man living."
+
+"Yes, she is," agreed Billy.  "But that isn't the point.  The point is
+that Lydia actually wants me.  I don't understand it myself, but she
+does and I know I can make her happy."
+
+"I can make her happy myself," said Amos, gruffly.
+
+"But you haven't," retorted Billy.  "Look at the way you've acted about
+this land matter.  And God knows, she deserves to be happy at any cost.
+Good heavens, when I think of her, it seems to me that nothing could be
+too much for her.  I think of her trudging those miles in her patched
+old clothes to buy her school books--what a thin, big-eyed kiddie she
+was.  Why, even as a cub, I used to appreciate her.  And then when she
+stood up before the hearing, the bravest man among us, and when she got
+sick trying to earn those silly Prom clothes----  My God, Amos, if
+Lydia wants me, or the moon, or a town lot in South Africa, it's up to
+you to give it to her."
+
+Amos did not reply for a moment.  Down through the years he was
+watching a thin little figure trudge with such patience and sweetness
+and determination as he seemed never before to have appreciated.
+Slowly his hold loosened on Lydia's shoulders and he looked into her
+face.
+
+"Do you want to marry Billy?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, Daddy, yes," whispered Lydia.
+
+Amos looked up at the young man, who stood returning his gaze.  "Take
+her, Billy, and heaven help you if you're not good to her, for John
+Levine's spirit will haunt you with a curse."
+
+Billy raised Lydia to her feet and the extraordinary smile was on his
+face.
+
+"What do you think about it, Lizzie?" he asked.  Lizzie, who had been
+crying comfortably, wiped her eyes with the sock she was darning.
+
+"I'm thinking that any one that can bring the look to Lydia's face
+she's been wearing for twenty-four hours, deserves her.  Rheumatism or
+no, down I get on my old knees to-night and give thanks--just for the
+look in that child's eyes."
+
+And now for a while, Lydia was content to live absolutely in the
+present, as was Billy.  Surely there never was such an April.  And
+surely no April ever melted so softly into so glorious a May.  Apple
+blossoms, lilac blooms, violets and wind flowers and through them,
+Lydia in her scholar's gown, hanging to Billy's arm, after the day's
+work was done.
+
+She seemed singularly uninterested in the preparations for
+Commencement, though she went through her final examinations with
+credit.  But the week before Commencement she came home one afternoon
+with blazing cheeks.  Billy was at the cottage for supper and when they
+had begun the meal, she exploded her bomb.
+
+"Dad!  Billy!  Lizzie!  They've elected me a member of the Scholars'
+Club!"
+
+"For the love of heaven!" exclaimed Amos, dropping his fork.
+
+"Why not?" asked Lizzie.
+
+"Lydia, dear, but I'm proud of you," breathed Billy.
+
+"Professor Willis told me, this afternoon," Lydia went on, "and I
+laughed at him at first.  I thought he was teasing me.  Why only
+high-brows belong to the Scholars' Club!  Prexy belongs and the best of
+the professors and only a few of the post-graduate pupils.  But he says
+I was elected.  I told him lots of students had higher standings than
+I, and he only laughed and said he knew it.  And I've got to go to that
+banquet of theirs next week!"
+
+"Fine!" said Billy.
+
+"Fine!  Why, Billy Norton, I never went to a banquet in my life.  I
+don't know what forks to use, and I _never saw a finger bowl_!"
+
+Amos grinned.  "What's the use of being a scholar, if that sort of
+thing bothers you?"
+
+"I might get a book on etiquette and polish up," said Lydia,
+thoughtfully.  "I'll get one to-morrow, and practise on the family."
+
+Amos groaned, but to no avail.  Lydia borrowed a book on etiquette from
+the library and for a week Amos ate his supper with an array of silver
+and kitchen-ware before him that took his appetite away.  He rebelled
+utterly at using the finger bowls, which at breakfast were porridge
+dishes.  Lizzie, however, was apt and read the book so diligently while
+Lydia was in class that she was able to correct Lydia as well as Amos
+at night.
+
+Ma Norton had insisted on making Lydia a white mull graduation dress.
+She would not let either Lizzie or Lydia help her.  She had been
+daughter-hungry all her life and since she made her own wedding gown,
+no bit of sewing had given her the satisfaction that this did.
+
+So it was that Lydia, wearing the mull under her scholar's gown, and
+with the precepts of the book on etiquette in her mind, attended the
+Scholars' banquet, timidly but not with the self-consciousness that she
+might otherwise have felt.
+
+Billy left her at the door of the hall and Professor Willis took her in
+to dinner.  There were only two other women there, but Lydia did not
+mind.
+
+"You never told me," said Willis, after Lydia had safely chosen her
+salad fork, "what you've done about the three hundred and twenty acres."
+
+Lydia looked up at him quickly.  She had been dreading this moment for
+some time.
+
+"I'm going to give up John Levine's claim on it, and enter on it as a
+homesteader."
+
+"But what an undertaking!" exclaimed Willis.
+
+"I'll not go alone," said Lydia gently.  "Billy Norton will go with me."
+
+Willis turned white, and laid down his salad fork.  Lydia turned her
+head away, then looked back, her eyes a little tear dimmed.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said.
+
+"Don't be," he answered, after a moment.  "You never did a kinder thing
+than to tell me this now--before--not but what it would have been too
+late, had you told me two years ago."
+
+"Oh, I am so sorry," repeated Lydia miserably.
+
+"But you mustn't be!  Besides, you and I are both scholars and scholars
+are always philosophers!"
+
+He was silent for the rest of the banquet, in spite of his philosophy.
+But when he was called on for his toast, which was the last one, he
+rose coolly enough, and began steadily,
+
+"My toast is to all scholars, everywhere, but also to one scholar in
+particular.  It is to one who was born with a love of books, to one who
+made books--good books--so intimate a part of her life that she made
+poverty a blessing, who combined books and living so deeply that she
+read her community aright, when others failed to do so, to one who is a
+scholar in the truest sense of the word--a book lover with a vision.  I
+drink to the youngest and sweetest scholar of us all!" and he bowed to
+Lydia.
+
+How she got through the congratulations and out to Billy, patiently
+waiting at the main campus gate, Lydia was not sure, for she was quite
+drunk with surprise and pleasure.  After she had told it all to Billy,
+and once more they were standing under the pine at the gate, she said,
+
+"Billy, will you go up with Father and Lizzie and me to open up the
+three hundred and twenty acres?"
+
+Billy answered slowly.  "There's nothing I'd like better.  I was born
+to be a farmer.  But, Lydia, it looks to me as if, as a lawyer, I'd be
+a more useful citizen, the way things are now in the country."
+
+Lydia shook her head.  "We've got too many lawyers in America.  What I
+think America needs is real love of America.  And it seems to me the
+best way to get it is to identify oneself with the actual soil of the
+community.  What I want is this.  That you and I, upon the ground where
+poor John Levine did such wrongs, build us a home.  I don't mean a home
+as Americans usually mean the word.  I mean we'll try to found a family
+there.  We'll send the roots of our roof tree so deep into the ground
+that for generations to come our children's children will be found
+there and our family name will stand for old American ideals in the
+community.  I don't see how else we Americans can make up to the world
+for the way we've exploited America."
+
+Billy stood with his arm about the slender "scholar."  Suddenly there
+flooded in upon him the old, old call, the call that had brought his
+Pilgrim forefathers across the Atlantic, the call that was as old as
+the yearning for freedom of the soil.
+
+"Lord!" he cried, "how glad I'll be to go up there!  Think of beginning
+our life together with such a dream!"
+
+"I believe John Levine would be glad, if he knew," said Lydia,
+wistfully.
+
+"I know he'd be glad. . . .  Lydia, do you love me, dear?"
+
+"Love you!  Oh, more than all the world!  You know it, don't you?"
+
+"I know it, but I can't believe it."  His arm tightened around Lydia
+and as on just such an evening, four years before, he said,
+
+"What a wonderful night!"
+
+A wonderful night, indeed!  Sound and scent of bursting summer.
+Syringas coming as lilacs went.  The lake, lap-lapping on the shore.
+The lazy croak of frogs and the moon sinking low over the cottage.
+Above them the pine, murmuring as of old.  Life and the year at the
+full.  A wonderful night, indeed!
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYDIA OF THE PINES***
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