octor grin at my father, and my father--yes, he actually winked back!
Old brutes, both of them--fifth commandment or no fifth commandment!

"No books--no office!" said old McPhail, "not for a while. Let the
colt run till he tires!"

So the colt was, as it were, turned out to grass. The official
explanation was that between nineteen and twenty there occurred a
dangerous period--twenty-one was a yet more dangerous age. _And I had
overgrown my strength!_

I liked that--_I_ who could vault the counter twenty-five times back
and forth, leaning only on the fingers of one hand!

Something during the long summer days drew me persistently to the Deep
Moat Woods. Some magnet of danger past and gone for ever--something,
too, of nearness to the little schoolhouse, to which, spite of my
father and myself, Elsie had carried her point and returned. I was
sulky and jealous about this--much to Elsie's indignation.

"Mr. Mustard--Mr. Mustard!" she said, with her eyes cold and
contemptuous; "I can keep Mr. Mustard in his place--ay, or ten of
him--you too, Joseph Yarrow, mopping about the woods like a sick cat!
You are not half the man your father is!"

And, indeed, I never set myself up to be.

The day I am telling about was a Saturday. Elsie was to have gone for
a walk with me; I expected it. But, instead, she informed me in the
morning, when I met her setting out to go to the school-house for an
extra lesson, that she had arranged to spend the afternoon with father
in his office, going into her grandfather's affairs.

"Mr. Yarrow," she said, "thinks that everything which my grandfather
possessed _before_ he began to kill people is quite rightly mine. He
had weaved hard for that. It would have been my mother's, and it ought
to be mine, too. Even a bad man, your father says, ought to be allowed
to do a little good after he is dead, if it can be arranged honestly.
That is what your father says."

"My father!" I repeated after her bitterly, "it is always my father
now."

"And good reason!" cried Elsie, firing up, "he gives the best and
wisest advice, and it would tell on you, Master Joe, if you took it a
little oftener."

"No wonder mother prefers Harriet Caw!" I muttered. And the next
moment I would have given all that I had in possession to have recalled
the words, but it is always that way with a tongue which runs too
easily.

Turning, Elsie gave me one long look, hurt, indignant, almost
anguished. Then she we