, and a new look came into his face. "I've
been thinkin' of it over," he said, soberly, "an'--I've got a plan."

"What's goin' to be done?" Ann raised herself in bed by her clutch
at her son's arm. Then she let go, and rocked herself to and fro,
hugging herself with her little lean arms, and wailing weakly.
"What's goin' to be done? Oh, oh! what's goin' to be done? Abel's
dead, he's dead, and Doctor Prescott, he holds the mortgage. We
'ain't got any money, or any home. What's goin' to be done? What's
goin' to be done? Oh, oh, oh, oh!"

Jerome grasped his mother by the shoulder and tried to force her back
upon her pillows. "Come, mother, lay down," said he.

"I won't! I won't! I never will. What's goin' to be done? What's
goin' to be done?"

"Mother, you lay right down and stop your cryin'," said Jerome; and
his mother started, and hushed, and stared at him, for his voice
sounded like his father's. The boy's wiry little hands upon her
shoulders, and his voice like his father's, constrained her strongly,
and she sank back; and her face appeared again, like a thin wedge of
piteous intelligence, in the great feather pillow.

"Now you lay still, mother," said Jerome, and to his mother's excited
eyes he looked taller and taller, as if in very truth this sudden
leap of his boyish spirit into the stature of a man had forced his
body with it. He straightened the quilt over his mother's meagre
shoulders. "I'm goin' to start the fire," said he, "and put on the
hasty-pudding, and when it's all ready I'll call Elmira, and we'll
help you up."

"What's goin' to be done?" his mother quavered again; but this time
feebly, as if her fierce struggles were almost hushed by contact with
authority.

"I've got a plan," said Jerome. "You just lay still, mother, and I'll
see what's best."

Ann Edwards's eyes rolled after the boy as he went out of the room,
but she lay still, obediently, and said not another word. An
unreasoning confidence in this child seized upon her. She leaned
strongly upon what, until now, she had held the veriest reed--to her
own stupefaction and with doubtful content, but no resistance. Jerome
seemed suddenly no longer her son; the memory of the time when she
had cradled and swaddled him failed her. The spirit of his father
awakened in him filled her at once with strangeness and awed
recognition.

She heard the boy pattering about in the kitchen, and, in spite of
herself, the conviction that his father was ou