!"

This to her father and, it is to be suspected, for her father's sake.
For, despite the girl's valiantly repeated hope that Temple "would come
back yet" and be again the man he once was, he seemed in fact to grow
more shiftless day after day, communing long over his fireplace with
his drink, passing from one degree to another of untidiness. He made
her "feel just like screaming and running around the house breaking
things" at times.

"You are impatient, my dear," said Temple as one speaking to a very
young child. "And there are matters which you don't understand; which
I cannot even discuss with you. But," and he winked very slyly, less
at Terry than just in a general acknowledgment of his own acumen, "you
just wait a spell! I've got somethin' up my sleeve--somethin' that----
Oh, you just wait, my dear!"

Terry sniffed.

"I ought to be pretty good at waiting by now," she told him, little
impressed. "And if you have anything up your sleeve besides the flabby
arm of a do-nothing, then it must be another bottle of whiskey! You
can't flim-flam me, dad, and you ought to know it."

She whisked out of the house, her face reddened with vexation, a sudden
moisture in her eyes. It took all of the fortitude she could summon
into her dauntless little bosom to maintain after days like this that
there was still a "come-back" left in her father.

In an hour made fragrant by the resinous odors of the upland pines and
the freshly liberated perfumes of the little white evening flowers
thick in the meadows, Terry on her favorite horse went flashing through
the long shadows of the late afternoon, riding as Terry always rode
when her breast was tumultuous and her temper rising.

The recently imported Japanese cook and houseboy peered out after her
from his kitchen window, his eyes actually losing their Oriental cast
and growing round; a trick, this, of Iki's whenever Terry came into his
view.

"Part bird," mused Iki, "part flower, big part wild devil-girl! Oof!
Nice to look at, but for wife Japonee girl more better. Think so."

Little by little as she rode, letting her horse out until she fairly
raced through the fields and into the woods beyond, the pitiful picture
of her father faded from her mind. As the vision dimmed of Temple's
shoddiness in his worn-out slippers another image formed in Terry's
mind; an image which was there more than the girl had as yet come to
realize.

Yes, as types the Packards were all ri