ed ferociously at his boots. "No, let well enough alone!"

He finished undressing, opened the window, turned out the gas and got into
bed. Wearily he closed his eyes. But after a time he opened them and stared
long through the window up at the beetling cliff of a building close by,
with its tier upon tier of lighted apartments, a huge garish hive of homes.
Yes, the town was crowding down on him to-night, on his house and on his
family. He realized it had never stopped, and that his three grown
children, each one of them a part of himself, had been struggling with it
all the time. Laura--wasn't she part of himself? Hadn't he, too, had his
little fling, back in his early twenties? "You will live on in our
children's lives." She was a part of him gone wild. She gave it free rein,
took chances. God, what a chance she had taken this time! The picture of
that court he had seen, with the girl in the witness chair and those many
rows of eyes avidly fixed upon her, came back to his mind so vividly they
seemed for a moment right here in the room, these eyes of the town boring
into his house. Angrily he shut out the scene. And alone in the darkness,
Roger said to his daughter all the ugly furious things he had not said to
her upstairs--until at last he was weary of it.

"Why am I working myself all up? I've got to take this. It's my medicine."

CHAPTER XXXIII

But as he watched Laura in the house, Roger's first emotions were
complicated more and more by a feeling of bewilderment. At dinner the next
evening he noticed with astonishment that she appeared like her natural
self. "She's acting," he decided. But this explanation he soon dismissed.
No, it was something deeper. She was actually unashamed, unafraid. That
first display of feelings, the night of her arrival, had been only the
scare of an hour. Within a few days she was back on her feet; and her cure
for her trouble, if trouble she felt, was not less but more pleasure, as
always. She went out nearly every evening now; and when she had spent what
money she had, she sold a part of her jewelry to the little old Galician
Jew in the shop around the corner. Yes, she was her natural self. And she
was as before to her father. Her attitude said plainly,

"It isn't fair to you, poor dear, to expect you to fully understand how
right I am in this affair. And considering your point of view, you're
acting very nicely."

Often as she talked to him a note of good-humored forgiven