d pale, she's never had a good time like other children."

Sandy Braden winced at her words, for an illuminated conscience
showed him what had cheated Libby Anne out of her childhood.

"Poor little kid!" he said.

"I knew," said Pearl, after a pause, "that day that Jimmy and I went
in with the onions that you didn't really know what a mean business
you were in, or you wouldn't do it. You did not look to me like a man
that would hit a woman."

"That's the part of it I can't forget," he said bitterly. "I can't
forget the look of that thin little wisp of a woman, and Lord! how
she glared at me! She could have killed me that day. I don't go much
on religion, Pearl. I don't see much in religion, but I certainly
would not hit a woman if I knew it."

"Where did you learn that?" Pearl asked quickly. "You wouldn't know
that if it wasn't for religion. Mr. Burrell was telling us last
Sunday that there's no religion teaches that only ours. You say you
don't go much on religion, and still it's religion that has put any
good in you that there is, and don't you forget it."

"That's not saying much for it, either," he said gloomily.

"Well, now, I think it is,"--said Pearl. "In lots of countries you'd
pass for an awful good man. It's on'y when you stood up beside
Christ, who was so good and kind and straight, that you can see
you're not what you ought to be. If it wasn't for the Bible and
Christ we wouldn't know how good a man should be."

"I haven't read the Bible for a goad many years," he said slowly. "I
don't believe I ever read much of it."

Pearl looked straight into his face, and said without a minute's
hesitation: "Well, I'll bet you a dollar some one read it for you and
passed it on to you."

Sandy Braden looked straight ahead of him, down the deeply tinted
prairie road, at the hazy outlines of the sand-hills, with their
scattered spruce trees, blurred now into indistinctness--that is, his
eyes were turned toward them, but what he really saw in one of those
sudden flashes of memory which makes us think that nothing is ever
entirely forgotten, was a cheerful old-fashioned room, with a
rag-carpet on the floor and pictures in round frames on the wall. The
sun came in through the eastern windows, and the whole place felt
like Sunday. He saw his mother sitting in a rocking-chair, with a big
Bible on her knee, and by her side was a little boy whom he knew to
be himself. He saw again on her finger the thin silver ring, wo