ss.

"What ails you, boy?" he demanded. "Have you got St. Vitus' dance? Sit
down an' quit frettin' people with your eternal trampin' about."

Even then, though his face was white with suppressed feeling, Ham held
hard to the curb of silence and took a chair, apart, where he sat rigid.

"It's them that sticks to their guns that wins out," declared the
bearded man, looking around as if challenging contradiction, and, when
none came, frowning on in silence. Then suddenly his eyes fell on the
figure of little Mary, who sat behind the table with her thin face
resting in her hands and her eyes burning with thoughts of that great
wonder-world which their visitor knew so well. His presence in the room
seemed to the child to bring its marvels almost within touch. For the
first time the father recognized the ludicrous massing of coils on the
top of the little head instead of the simple braids that should be
falling over her shoulders, and, in his mood of irritation, the
affectation of grown-up adornment angered him inordinately.

"What damned foolishness is that?" he demanded. "What started you to
putting on a lot of new airs all of a sudden? Do you think you're the
Queen of Sheba?"

The girl shrank back into the shadows at the edge of the room, and, as
young Edwardes glanced that way, he heard a muffled sob and knew that
she had fled up the stairs in chagrin, a pitiful little would-be
princess whose dream splendor had been shattered with a reprimand. His
intuition told him that she already lay curled up on her bed, sobbing
bitterly against the pillow where the coiled hair--now angrily torn down
from its burnished coronal--lay heaped and tangled about her head.

"I'm afraid," volunteered the guest with deep embarrassment, "I'm to
blame. I met Mary on the roadside once as I went down to the city, and
she told me how the children had been teasing her because she wasn't
pretty, I tried to comfort her with a prophecy that her wonderful eyes
and hair would establish her claims to beauty."

"So it was you, was it?" demanded Tom Burton shortly, "that set her
thoughts upon vanity--well, I don't thank you."

The boy, sitting with every nerve under painful control, felt his breath
come quick and deep until his chest heaved, and words leaped to his lips
which, with a supreme effort, he bit back. This whole intolerable
fallacy of outgrown and hard-shelled narrow-mindedness was spurring him
to outbreak, yet for a moment more he held h