hether the doctor will come and give him time to pay
for it.

"Oh, I don't believe the bug-hunter is going to have any trouble with
seeing all right again and we'll get the big doctor down here to see
him some way or other. Don't you worry, Miss Phyllis; I just told you
because you are the best friend of all concerned, and I couldn't do
anything without consulting you. See?" he asked, in the same
protecting tone of voice that Tony had used in the afternoon when
Belle and Mamie Sue did me that way.

After I was undressed I felt that I just must go into my mother's room
for a minute; and I begged so hard that the night nurse who is a very
kind lady, let me creep in for just a few seconds. I have got a theory
about Mother and myself. I believe she knows when I am in the room,
even if she can't show it by moving or even opening her eyes, and it
is a comfort to her and me both to have me come and kneel at the foot
of her bed well out of sight. I did get comforted to-night, too, and
the thought that did it was this. If Father and I don't do as well as
other people in the world, and get rich and do things that we ought
not to, we have not had her to direct and control and comfort us like
she would have done if she could; and no wonder we have strayed. A
motherless girl and a wifeless man ought not to be judged in the same
way other people are. I feel better now, and I'm leaving it all to
God, who understands such situations as mine and Father's. Good-night,
leather friend.

* * * * *

Somewhere back on your pages, Louise, I wrote that I was going to be
thankful for the happiness and friends that I had, no matter what
happened, and I am. It has happened. I am the lonely little child that
got a peep through the high, barred gate into the garden where other
children were playing in the sunshine, and then was put out into the
dark street again. I ought not to say that, though, when I have got
Mr. Douglass Byrd for a star in my darkness, as he has made himself by
the way he has treated me.

I am glad I stopped by on my way to school this morning to see Roxanne
and Lovelace Peyton while I was their light-hearted companion still:
now I am a woman of sorrows and disgrace. Also, I am glad, if the blow
had to be dealt me, it was Belle who did it, and not Mamie Sue nor one
of the two Willises, nor anybody else. I have always had a strange
feeling about that bracelet with the red set, anyway, and I am not
su