ed, vehemently.

"Not to this place, Dora. She would never do it. It wouldn't be fair to
ask her."

"But something must be done."

"I feel pretty sick about it. It was partly through me and my wretched
debts that father and mother got so short of money. Mother was always
hard up. It runs in the blood. And, what with one thing and another, we
were all of us in a pretty tight fix; and she tried to get us out of
it."

"I don't blame her for altering her father's checks. That's nothing,"
observed Dora, with typical feminine inconsequence, "but letting people
think that--"

"I know, I know! But it couldn't really have done me any harm when I was
under the turf; and it meant ruin to father, if she had done nothing.
Look here, Dora, mother must come back, or father must go to her. We've
got to arrange it between us. If mother won't come home, she must be
fetched."

Dora sat for a few moments with her elbows resting on her knees and her
chin on her hands, gazing thoughtfully out of the window, watching the
sparrows on the path outside.

"Can she ever forgive him?" she asked, after a pause.

"Well, the sermon was certainly pretty rough, especially after things
had been all smoothed out. But father is a demon for doing nasty things
when he thinks they've got to be done. You don't suppose he's any less
fond of mother than before, do you?"

"No; but, you see, a woman feels differently about these things--things
of conscience, I mean. Your mother probably thinks he despises her, and a
proud woman can never stand that."

"But he doesn't. It was himself that he was troubled about, to think that
he had strayed from the strict path of duty to such an extent as to allow
me--his son--to be blamed for that--Well, it's all wrong, anyway, and
mother's got to come home."

"How are we to set about it, Dick?"

"Dora, you'll have to go and fetch her. I've thought it all out."

"I? How can I? That wouldn't do at all, Dick. Don't you see that she
would resent it--the advance coming from me, because I was one of those
most concerned and affected by her sin; and, being a woman, more likely
to be hard upon her than anyone else."

"You mean that you nearly married Ormsby because she led you to think
that I wasn't worth a tinker's damn. Well, perhaps I wasn't--before the
war. But I learned things out there. I had to pull myself together, and
endure and go through such privation that a whole life on fifteen dollars
a week would be lux