everything from your thoughts
but the future and what we are all going to help you make of it."

Willa rose.

"You are all very kind," she said in a stifled voice. "I'm bound to be
a heap of nuisance to you, I'm afraid, though I made up my mind not to
buck the game strong till I'd learned the rules. But don't ask me to
be a piker and forget Dad! You don't know what he was to me! I
appreciate what you-all are trying to do, Mrs. Halstead, and I
sympathize with you, for it's going to be a tough job all around, no
matter how I try to follow your lead, but don't stack the cards on the
first deal, please. All I've got in the world now is my memory of the
best friend that ever lived!"

"Your loyalty is very touching, dear child, and I would be the last to
impugn it." Mrs. Halstead put two rigid dutiful arms about her. "Your
clothes are a mere detail which we will take up later. You must go to
bed now, and sleep."

Willa stumbled from the room with a sense of baffled defeat as if she
had incontinently butted against a wall of granite. Her aching heart
cried out for familiar things and faces, but she steeled herself
valiantly. She must play the game!

CHAPTER VIII

WILLA SITS IN

"Well, what do you think of her?" Mason North's eyes twinkled as he
put the question to the Ripley Halsteads in solemn conference on the
following evening.

"A very interesting young woman," Halstead replied emphatically.
"She's refreshingly genuine and original, in this artificial,
cut-and-dried age."

Mrs. Halstead shuddered.

"Aboriginal, I should say," she murmured. "And quite astonishingly
impervious to the social amenities."

"I gathered that, myself," Mason North nodded. "I talked to her till I
was blue in the face, but unless she could see a direct reason for
doing a thing, or not doing it, she followed her own instinct."

"It wouldn't lead her far wrong," declared Halstead. "She may lack the
minor hypocrisies, but she'll wall herself in with them soon enough,
the Lord knows. She's willing to listen to reason, that's something.

"The life down there may have been rough, but it has not destroyed her
native fineness and high principle. I don't say that I should care to
have Angie go through such an experience, but it might have made a man
of Vernon to buck up against it. Look at young Thode!"

"Kearn Thode?" The attorney glanced up quickly. "I thought he was out
West?"

"No. Larkin tells me he sent hi