Larry, 'children, obey your parents' is still valid," said
Nora. "What are you but a child after all, though with your teaching and
your choral society conducting, and your nigger show business, and
your preaching in the church, and your popularity, you are getting so
uplifted that there's no holding you. Just make up your mind to do your
duty, do you hear? Your duty. Give up this selfish determination to have
your own way, this selfish pleasing of yourself." Abruptly she paused,
rushed at him, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him. "You
darling old humbug," she said with a very unsteady voice. "There, I will
be blubbering in a minute. I am off for the timber lot. What do you say,
Katty? It's cooler now. We'll go up the cool road. Are you coming?"

"Yes; wait until I change."

"All right, I will saddle up. You coming, Larry?"

"No, I'll catch up later."

"Now, Mother," warned Nora, "I know his ways and wiles. Remember your
duty to your children. You are also inclined to be horribly selfish. Be
firm. Hurry up, Kate."

Left alone with his mother, Larry went deliberately to work with her.
Well he knew the immovable quality of her resolution when once her mind
was made up. Patiently, quietly, steadily, he argued with her, urging
Nora's claims for a year at college.

"She needs a change after her years of hard work."

Her education was incomplete; the ground work was sound enough, but
she had come to the age when she must have those finishing touches that
girls require to fit them for their place in life. "She is a splendid
girl, but in some ways still a child needing discipline; in other ways
mature, too mature. She ought to have her chance and ought to have it
now." One never knew what would happen in the case of girls.

His mother sighed. "Poor Nora, she has had discipline enough of a kind,
and hard discipline it has been indeed for you all."

"Nonsense, Mother, we have had a perfectly fine time together, all of
us. God knows if any one has had a hard time it is not the children in
this home. I do not like to think of those awful winters, Mother, and of
the hard time you had with us all."

"A hard time!" exclaimed his mother. "I, a hard time, and with you all
here beside me, and all so well and strong? What more could I want?" The
amazed surprise in her face stirred in her son a quick rush of emotion.

"Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother," he whispered in her ear. "There is no one
like you. Did you ever in a