s father, with the most filial pride and confidence,
against his creditors.

Anderson held out his hand to Charlotte. "Good-night," he said,
hastily, "and I hope you will feel no ill effects to-morrow from your
fright." Then he was gone before Charlotte could say anything more.

"It's an awful shindy," Eddy said, still in that tone of strange
glee, to his sister. To his great amazement, she caught him suddenly
by his arm, the hurt one, but he did not flinch.

The girl began to cry. "Oh, Eddy!" she sobbed, pitifully. "Oh, Eddy
dear!"

"What are you crying for, Charlotte?" asked Eddy, giving his head a
rough caressing duck against hers. "Papa's enough for them; you know
that. He ain't a mite scared."

Chapter XXIX

Anderson, as he went away that night, had before his eyes Charlotte's
little face, the intensity of which had seemed to make it fairly
luminous in the dim light, as she had turned it towards him. There
was in that face at once unreasoning and childish anger that he was
there at all, and in a measure a witness of the distress and disgrace
of herself and her family, and a piteous appeal for help--at once a
forbidding and a beseeching. For Anderson, naturally, the forbidding
seemed most in evidence as an impulse to action. He felt that he must
withdraw immediately and save them all the additional mortification
that he could. So he hurried away down the road, with the girl's face
before his eyes, and the sound of the scolding voice in the house in
his ears. The voice carried far. In spite of the wrath in it, it was
a sweet, almost a singing, voice, high-pitched but sonorous. It was
the voice of little Willy Eddy's German wife, and it came from a pair
of strong lungs in a well-developed chest, and was actuated by a
strong and indignant spirit. Arthur Carroll, listening to her, was
conscious of an absurdly impersonal sentiment of something like
admiration. The young woman was really in a manner superb. The
occasion was trivial, even ignoble. Carroll felt contemptuous both
for her and for himself, and yet she dignified it to a degree. Minna
Eddy was built on a large scale; she was both muscular and stout. Her
short, blue-woollen skirt, increasing with its fulness her firm hips,
disclosed generously her sturdy feet and ankles, which had a certain
beauty of fitness as pedestals of support for her great bulk of
femininity. She had come out just as she had been about her household
tasks, and her cotton blous