oftened and paled. He looked to her at that moment more like his
father than himself. He was accusing her.

"Mother, do you think, if she cares, that I would ever desert her,
any more than father would have deserted you?" he demanded.

It was her turn to excuse herself. "I know you are honorable,
Randolph," she said, "but I saw when I came in, and I don't see how
you have seen enough of her to have it happen; but I know girls, and
I can see how she feels, and I didn't know but you might think if her
father--"

"What difference do you think her father makes to me, mother?" asked
Anderson.

Chapter XL

When Carroll came to himself that night after his fall, his first
conscious motion was for his dollar watch. He was in William
Allbright's bed. There were only two sleeping-apartments in the
little tenement. William was seated beside him, watching him with his
faithful, serious face; there was also a physician, keenly observant,
still closer to the injured man's head; and the sister, Allbright's
sister, was visible in the next room, seated in a chair which
commanded a good view of the bed. It was Allbright who had rescued
Carroll from the station-house; for when he did not rise, the usual
crowd, who directly attribute all failures to recover one's self from
a manifestly inappropriate recumbent position, had collected, and
several policemen were on the scene.

"I know this gentleman," Allbright said, in his rather humble, still
half-respectful, voice, which carried conviction. "I know this
gentleman. I have been a book-keeper in his office. He slipped on the
ice. I saw him fall. He is not drunk."

One of the policemen, who had been long in the vicinity and knew
Allbright, as from the heights of the law one might know an
unimportant and unoffending citizen, responded.

"All right," he said, laconically. "Hospital?"

"Guess he's hurted pretty bad," remarked another policeman, who was a
handsome athlete.

"Hospital?" inquired the first, who was a man of few words, of
Allbright.

"I guess we'd better have him taken to my house. It's right here,"
replied Allbright. "Then we'll call in Dr. Wilson and see how much is
the matter with him. Maybe he's only stunned. The hospital is apt to
be a long siege, and if there isn't any need of it--"

"His house is right here," said the first policeman to the second,
with a stage aside.

"All right," said the second.

A boy pulled Allbright by the sleeve. "Say, I'll go