o stand erect
and awry. He had blue eyes, a mouth inclined to harshness, a manner
somewhat brusk and impatient. To many he appeared absent-minded.

Suddenly, as he sat tying his shoes, he heard a clatter of pans in the
kitchen down-stairs, and he paused to listen. "I wonder," he thought,
"if that brat is cooking breakfast again. She must be, for neither one
of those women would be out of bed as early as this. It was three
o'clock when they came in."

Blowing out his light, he groped from the room into the dark passage
outside, and descended the old creaking stairs to the hall below. The
front door was open, and he sniffed angrily. "They didn't even lock it.
They must have been drunk again. Well, that's their business, not mine."

The kitchen was at the far end of the hall and he turned into it. It was
almost filled with smoke. A little girl stood at the old-fashioned
range, putting sticks of wood in at the door. She was about nine years
of age, wore a cast-off dress, woman's size, and was barefooted. She had
good features, her eyes were blue, her hair abundant and golden, her
hands, now splotched with smut, were small and slender. She was not a
relative of John's, being the orphaned niece of Miss Jane Holder, who
shared the house with John's mother, who was a widow.

The child's name was Dora Boyles, and she smiled in chagrin as he stared
down on her in the lamplight and demanded:

"Say, say, what's this--trying to smoke us to death?"

"I made a mistake," the child faltered. "The damper in the pipe was
turned wrong, and while I was on the back porch, mixing the
biscuit-dough, it smoked before I knew it. It will stop now. You see it
is drawing all right."

With an impatient snort, he threw open the two windows in the room and
opened the outer door, standing aside and watching the blue smoke trail
out, cross the porch floor, and dissolve in the grayish light of dawn.

"The biscuits are about done," Dora said. "The coffee water has boiled
and I'm going to fry the eggs and meat. The pan is hot and it won't take
long."

"I was going to get a bite at the restaurant," he answered, in a
mollified tone.

"But you said the coffee was bad down there and the bread stale," Dora
argued, as she dropped some slices of bacon into the pan. "And once you
said the place was not open and you went to work without anything. I
might as well do this. I can't sleep after the whistle blows. Your ma
and Aunt Jane waked me when they cam