them,
walked away quickly, and was at once lost to their sight in the
darkness.

"There's a fine boy to've had the trouble of raising!" Adams grumbled.
"Just crazy, that's all."

"What in the world do you suppose he wants all that money for?" his
wife said, wonderingly. "I can't imagine what he could DO with it. I
wonder----" She paused. "I wonder if he----"

"If he what?" Adams prompted her irritably.

"If he COULD have bad--associates."

"God knows!" said Adams. "_I_ don't! It just looks to me like he had
something in him I don't understand. You can't keep your eye on a boy
all the time in a city this size, not a boy Walter's age. You got a girl
pretty much in the house, but a boy'll follow his nature. _I_ don't know
what to do with him!"

Mrs. Adams brightened a little. "He'll come out all right," she said.
"I'm sure he will. I'm sure he'd never be anything really bad: and he'll
come around all right about the glue-works, too; you'll see. Of course
every young man wants money--it doesn't prove he's doing anything wrong
just because he asks you for it."

"No. All it proves to me is that he hasn't got good sense asking me for
three hundred and fifty dollars, when he knows as well as you do the
position I'm in! If I wanted to, I couldn't hardly let him have three
hundred and fifty cents, let alone dollars!"

"I'm afraid you'll have to let ME have that much--and maybe a little
more," she ventured, timidly; and she told him of her plans for the
morrow. He objected vehemently.

"Oh, but Alice has probably asked him by this time," Mrs. Adams said.
"It really must be done, Virgil: you don't want him to think she's
ashamed of us, do you?"

"Well, go ahead, but just let me stay away," he begged. "Of course I
expect to undergo a kind of talk with him, when he gets ready to say
something to us about Alice, but I do hate to have to sit through a
fashionable dinner."

"Why, it isn't going to bother you," she said; "just one young man as a
guest."

"Yes, I know; but you want to have all this fancy cookin'; and I see
well enough you're going to get that old dress suit out of the cedar
chest in the attic, and try to make me put it on me."

"I do think you better, Virgil."

"I hope the moths have got in it," he said. "Last time I wore it was to
the banquet, and it was pretty old then. Of course I didn't mind wearing
it to the banquet so much, because that was what you might call quite an
occasion." He spoke with s