hing for her." She sat still;
she did not even brush to the floor the fantastic thing that lay in her
lap, and that sent up faintly the odour of the sachet powder with which
Irene liked to perfume her boxes.

Lapham went out with the unhappy child, and began to talk with her,
crazily, incoherently, enough.

She mercifully stopped him. "Don't talk, papa. I don't want any one
should talk with me."

He obeyed, and they walked silently on and on. In their aimless course
they reached the new house on the water side of Beacon, and she made
him stop, and stood looking up at it. The scaffolding which had so
long defaced the front was gone, and in the light of the gas-lamp
before it all the architectural beauty of the facade was suggested, and
much of the finely felt detail was revealed. Seymour had pretty nearly
satisfied himself in that rich facade; certainly Lapham had not stinted
him of the means.

"Well," said the girl, "I shall never live in it," and she began to
walk on.

Lapham's sore heart went down, as he lumbered heavily after her. "Oh
yes, you will, Irene. You'll have lots of good times there yet."

"No," she answered, and said nothing more about it. They had not
talked of their trouble at all, and they did not speak of it now.
Lapham understood that she was trying to walk herself weary, and he was
glad to hold his peace and let her have her way. She halted him once
more before the red and yellow lights of an apothecary's window.

"Isn't there something they give you to make you sleep?" she asked
vaguely. "I've got to sleep to-night!"

Lapham trembled. "I guess you don't want anything, Irene."

"Yes, I do! Get me something!" she retorted wilfully. "If you don't, I
shall die. I MUST sleep."

They went in, and Lapham asked for something to make a nervous person
sleep. Irene stood poring over the show-case full of brushes and
trinkets, while the apothecary put up the bromide, which he guessed
would be about the best thing. She did not show any emotion; her face
was like a stone, while her father's expressed the anguish of his
sympathy. He looked as if he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids
drooped over his glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid.
He started as the apothecary's cat stole smoothly up and rubbed itself
against his leg; and it was to him that the man said, "You want to take
a table-spoonful of that, as long as you're awake. I guess it won't
take a great many t