traightened out, and warm,
it didn't rip so when he breathed, then they put him in the parlour on
the big davenport. Leon said if the sparkin' bench didn't bring him
to, nothing would. Laddie sat beside him and mother kept peeping. She
wouldn't let Dr. Fenner go, because she said Mr. Pryor just must come
out of it right, and have a few years of peace and happiness.

Mrs. Pryor came back with Laddie and Robert. He carried her in, put
her in the big rocking chair again, and he sat beside her, stroking and
kissing her, while she held him with both hands. You could see NOW why
his mother couldn't sleep, walked the road, and held her hands over her
heart. She was a brave woman, and she had done well to keep alive and
going in any shape at all. You see we knew. There had been only the
few hours when it seemed possible that one of our boys had taken
father's money and was gone. I well remembered what happened to our
mother then. And if she had been disgraced before every one, dragged
from her home away across a big sea to live among strangers, and not
known where her boy was for years, I'm not a bit sure that she'd have
done better than Mrs. Pryor. Yes, she would too; come to think it
out--she'd have kept on believing the Lord had something to do with it,
and that He'd fix it some way; and I know she and father would have
held hands no matter what happened or where they went.

I guess the biggest thing the matter with Pryors was that they didn't
know how to go about loving each other right; maybe it was because they
didn't love God, so they couldn't know exactly what PROPER LOVE was;
because God is love, like father said.

Mrs. Pryor didn't want to see Mr. Pryor--I can't get used to calling
them Paget--and she didn't ask anything about him. I guess she was
pretty mad at him. She never had liked the Emmet cousin, and she'd had
nothing but trouble with him all the time he had been in her family,
and then that awful disgrace, that she always THOUGHT was all him, but
she couldn't prove it, and she had no money.

That's a very bad thing. A woman should always have some money. She
works as hard as any one, and usually she has more that worries her, so
it's only fair for her to have part of what the work and worry bring.
Mother always has money. Why, she has so much, she can help father out
when he is pushed with bills, as she did last fall, to start Shelley to
music school. It's no way to be forced to live with a