st being sort of sadly happy just then."

"Were you? Was it 'sadly,' too?"

"Don't you know?" she said. "It seems to me that only little children
can be just happily happy. I think when we get older our happiest
moments are like the one I had just then: it's as if we heard strains of
minor music running through them--oh, so sweet, but oh, so sad!"

"But what makes it sad for YOU?"

"I don't know," she said, in a lighter tone. "Perhaps it's a kind of
useless foreboding I seem to have pretty often. It may be that--or it
may be poor papa."

"You ARE a funny, delightful girl, though!" Russell laughed. "When your
father's so well again that he goes out walking in the evenings!"

"He does too much walking," Alice said. "Too much altogether, over at
his new plant. But there isn't any stopping him." She laughed and shook
her head. "When a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his
family don't appear to have much weight with him. He'll walk all he
wants to, in spite of them."

"I suppose so," Russell said, absently; then he leaned forward. "I wish
I could understand better why you were 'sadly' happy."

Meanwhile, as Alice shed what further light she could on this point, the
man ambitious to be a "multi-millionaire" was indeed walking too much
for his own good. He had gone to bed, hoping to sleep well and rise
early for a long day's work, but he could not rest, and now, in his
nightgown and slippers, he was pacing the floor of his room.

"I wish I DID know," he thought, over and over. "I DO wish I knew how he
feels about it."

CHAPTER XVIII

That was a thought almost continuously in his mind, even when he was
hardest at work; and, as the days went on and he could not free himself,
he became querulous about it. "I guess I'm the biggest dang fool alive,"
he told his wife as they sat together one evening. "I got plenty else
to bother me, without worrying my head off about what HE thinks. I
can't help what he thinks; it's too late for that. So why should I keep
pestering myself about it?"

"It'll wear off, Virgil," Mrs. Adams said, reassuringly. She was gentle
and sympathetic with him, and for the first time in many years he would
come to sit with her and talk, when he had finished his day's work. He
had told her, evading her eye, "Oh, I don't blame you. You didn't get
after me to do this on your own account; you couldn't help it."

"Yes; but it don't wear off," he complained. "This afternoon I was
showin