"

"Well, he has done it." "And I've tried to write to him about it--two
letters: one so humble and grateful that it couldn't stand up on its
edge, and the other so pert and flippant. Mother, I wish you could
have seen those two letters! I wish I had kept them to look at if I
ever got to thinking I had any sense again. They would take the
conceit out of me."

"What's the reason he don't come here any more?"

"Doesn't he come?" asked Penelope in turn, as if it were something she
had not noticed particularly.

"You'd ought to know."

"Yes." She sat silent a while. "If he doesn't come, I suppose it's
because he's offended at something I did."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing. I--wrote to him--a little while ago. I suppose it was very
blunt, but I didn't believe he would be angry at it. But this--this
that he's done shows he was angry, and that he wasn't just seizing the
first chance to get out of it."

"What have you done, Pen?" demanded her mother sharply.

"Oh, I don't know. All the mischief in the world, I suppose. I'll
tell you. When you first told me that father was in trouble with his
business, I wrote to him not to come any more till I let him. I said I
couldn't tell him why, and he hasn't been here since. I'm sure I don't
know what it means."

Her mother looked at her with angry severity. "Well, Penelope Lapham!
For a sensible child, you ARE the greatest goose I ever saw. Did you
think he would come here and SEE if you wouldn't let him come?"

"He might have written," urged the girl.

Her mother made that despairing "Tchk!" with her tongue, and fell back
in her chair. "I should have DESPISED him if he had written. He's
acted just exactly right, and you--you've acted--I don't know HOW
you've acted. I'm ashamed of you. A girl that could be so sensible
for her sister, and always say and do just the right thing, and then
when it comes to herself to be such a DISGUSTING simpleton!"

"I thought I ought to break with him at once, and not let him suppose
that there was any hope for him or me if father was poor. It was my
one chance, in this whole business, to do anything heroic, and I jumped
at it. You mustn't think, because I can laugh at it now, that I wasn't
in earnest, mother! I WAS--dead! But the Colonel has gone to ruin so
gradually, that he's spoilt everything. I expected that he would be
bankrupt the next day, and that then HE would understand what I meant.
But to have it drag along