storm of tears had quieted, and several big hugs had
been exchanged, Anthony set the boy down upon the floor and took his hand.
Silently the two walked out of the house and down the garden. The
hook-and-ladder cart stood patiently waiting, just where it had waited all
day. Little Tony ran to it and picked it up. Over his exquisite face broke
the first smile that had been seen there since the earliest disregarded
command of the morning.

"Ve fire chief's gone," he said. "He was a bad fire chief."

So together the man and the boy escorted the hook-and-ladder cart to the
nursery, and backed it carefully into its stall, between the milk wagon
and the automobile. Then the child went to his play. But the man drew a
long breath.

"I would rather manage a hundred striking workmen," he said to himself
with emphasis.

XXVI.--ON GUARD

While little Tony had been growing, waxing strong and sturdy: while Juliet
had been tending and training him, learning, as every mother does, more
than she could impart: Anthony, in his place, had not stood still. The
strength and determination he had from the first hour put into his daily
work had begun to tell. His position in a great mercantile establishment
had steadily advanced as he had made himself more and more indispensable
to its heads.

Cathcart, the successful architect, began to talk about a new home for the
man into whose hands Henderson and Henderson were putting large interests
to manage for them, and whose salary, he asserted, must now justify,
indeed call for, life under more ideal surroundings than the little home
in the unfashionable suburb which poverty had at first made necessary.

"Let me draw some plans for you," urged Cathcart, one evening in June,
when he had run out to see his friend. Juliet was by chance away, and
Cathcart took advantage of this to call Anthony's attention, in a politely
frank fashion, to the shortcomings of his present residence. "It's all
right in its way," he said, standing upon a corner of the lawn with
Anthony, and surveying the house critically. "Mrs. Robeson certainly
deserves full credit for the admirable way in which she restored the old
house and added just the changes in keeping with its possibilities. I've
always said it couldn't have been better done, with the means you've told
me you were able to put at her disposal. But the place is too small for
you now."

"I don't think we feel it so," said Anthony tentatively, strolling