e could always look
into his daughter's eyes and there find faith in himself and strength
and sunny patience.

Formerly these fountains of perpetual youth had been beside him all the
long days through. From village to village, from store to farm, they
had jogged, side by side, in a lazy old buggy; he smoking long, silent
pipes, perhaps, or entertaining his companion with tales and poems of
the days of chivalry when men were brave and women fair and all the
world was young. And, Mary, inthralled, enrapt, adoring her father, and
seeing every picture conjured up by his sonorous rhythm or quaint
phrase, was much more familiar with the deeds and gossip of King
Arthur's court than with events of her own day and country.

So that while Mary, tied to the baby, yearned for the wide spaces of her
freedom, Mr. Buckley, lonely in a dusty buggy, jogging over the familiar
roads, thought longingly of a little figure in an irresponsible
sunbonnet, and found it difficult to bear patiently with matronly
neighbors, who congratulated him upon this arrangement, and assured him
that his little play-fellow would now quickly outgrow her old-fashioned
ways and become as other children, "which she would never have, Mr.
Buckley, as long as you let her tag around with you and filled her head
with impossible nonsense."

It was not a desire for any such alteration which made him acquiesce in
the separation. It was a very grave concern for his wife's health, and a
very sharp realization that, until he could devise some means of
increasing his income, he could not afford to engage a more experienced
nurse for the new arrival. He had no ideas of the suffering entailed
upon his elder daughter. He was deceived, as was every one else, by the
gentle uncomplainingness with which she waited upon Theodora, for whose
existence she regarded herself as entirely to blame. Had she not,
without consulting her parents, applied to high heaven for an increase
in live stock, and was not the answer to this application, however
inexact, manifestly her responsibility.

"They're awful good to me," she pondered. "They ain't scolded me a
mite, an' I just know how they must feel about it. Mamma ain't had her
health ever since that baby come, an' papa looks worried most to death.
If they'd 'a' sent that goat an' wagon I could 'a' took mamma riding.
Ain't prayers terrible when they go wrong!" And in gratitude for their
forbearance she, erstwhile the companion, or at least t