.

She went out on the porch in time to put her arms about her father's
shabby shoulders when he came in. Mr. Paget was tired, and he told his
wife and daughters that he thought he was a very sick man. Margaret's
mother met this statement with an anxious solicitude that was very
soothing to the sufferer. She made Mark get Daddy his slippers and
loose coat, and suggested that Rebecca shake up the dining-room couch
before she established him there, in a rampart of pillows. No outsider
would have dreamed that Mrs. Paget had dealt with this exact emergency
some hundreds of times in the past twenty years.

Mr. Paget, reclining, shut his eyes, remarked that he had had an
"awful, awful day," and wondered faintly if it would be too much
trouble to have "somebody" make him just a little milk toast for
his dinner. He smiled at Margaret when she sat down beside him;
all the children were dear, but the oldest daughter knew she came
first with her father.

"Getting to be an old, old man!" he said wearily, and Margaret hated
herself because she had to quell an impatient impulse to tell him he
was merely tired and cross and hungry, before she could say, in the
proper soothing tone, "Don't talk that way, Dad darling!" She had to
listen to a long account of the "raise," wincing every time her father
emphasized the difference between her own position and that of her
employer. Dad was at least the equal of any one in Weston! Why, a
man Dad's age oughtn't to be humbly asking a raise, he ought to be
dictating now. It was just Dad's way of looking at things, and it
was all wrong.

"Well, I'll tell you one thing!" said Rebecca, who had come in with a
brimming soup plate of milk toast, "Joe Redman gave a picnic last
month, and he came here with his mother, in the car, to ask me. And I
was the scornfullest thing you ever saw, wasn't I, Ted? Not much!"

"Oh, Beck, you oughtn't to mix social and business things that way!"
Margaret said helplessly.

"Dinner!" screamed the nine-year-old Robert, breaking into the room at
this point, and "Dinner!" said Mrs. Paget, wearily, cheerfully, from
the chair into which she had dropped at the head of the table. Mr.
Paget, revived by sympathy, milk toast, and Rebecca's attentions, took
his place at the foot, and Bruce the chair between Margaret and his
mother. Like the younger boys, whose almost confluent freckles had
been brought into unusual prominence by violently applied soap and
water, and whose ha