ank you, just a girl. But a girl who loves her brother and
her father all the more because--_she_ loved them too. A girl who has
made up her mind to do the first thing and everything that offers,
which will help to make them comfortable; who is going to put her family
pride in her pocket and go to work. There, it's out!"

"Go--out--to--work, Amy--Kaye!"

"Yes, indeed. Don't take it so hard, dear."

In spite of himself he smiled. Then he remembered. "I don't see how you
can laugh or jest--so soon. As if--but you _must_ care."

"Just because I do care, so very, very much. Oh, Hal, don't dream I'm
not missing her every hour of the day. I fancy I hear her saying now,
this moment, as she used to say when I'd been naughty and was penitent:
'If thee loves me so much, dear, thee will try to do the things I like.'
The one thing she liked, she _lived_, was a brave helpfulness toward
everybody she knew. She didn't wait for great things, she did little
things. Now, the first little things that are facing us are: the earning
of our rent and of our food."

Hallam said nothing. He knocked a stone aside with the end of his
crutch, and groaned.

"I'm going to work in the mill," she continued.

"Amy! Father expressly forbade that, or even any mention of it. You, a
Kaye!"

"He has given me permission, even though I am a Kaye." She tried to
smile still, but found it hard in the face of his want of sympathy, even
indignation.

"Do you think he knew what he was saying when he did it?"

"Yes, Hallam, I do. It seems to me that father is more like other folks
since this trouble came than he was before. I was worried and asked the
doctor, for I remembered mother always used to spare him everything
painful or difficult that she could. The doctor said:--

"'It may be that this blow will do more to restore him than all her
tender care could do.'

"And then I asked him something else. It was--what was the matter with
him--if it was all his heart. He said, 'No, indeed. It's his head.' He
was in a great fire, at a hotel where he was staying, a long time ago.
He was nearly killed, and many other people were killed. For a while he
thought that mother had been burned, they had gotten separated some way,
and it made him--insane, I suppose. But when she was found, in a
hospital where he was taken, he got better. He isn't at all insane now,
the doctor says, but is only a little confused. Mother never had us told
about it, because she wanted w