"Listen to me, you dumbhead. You may think this adventure is over.
Well, so did I, but I tell you now it's only just beginning. If you are
not mighty careful you will be wrecking a home. So keep your mouth
shut," he charged her, "and do nothing till you hear from me!"

Maudie smiled archly, coyly, confidentially, and he went upstairs.

In the sitting-room, he found gathered together his mother, his sister
and Dick Van Plank, Mary's young brother and a student at Columbia. John
was supported through Edith's first remark and the look with which she
accompanied it by the memory of her goodness to Mary and by the
anticipation of the fun which Maudie might be made to provide.

"I wish to say, John," she began, before any one else had time to speak,
"that I've said _nothing_ to mother or Dick, and I think it would be
better if you didn't. I can attend to the case if you leave it to me."

"Like you," said John shortly. "Who told you she is a 'case.' Mother,"
he went on addressing that gentle knitter by the fire, "I want you to
come downstairs."

"She shall do nothing of the kind!" cried Edith, and as Mrs. Sedyard
looked interrogatively from one to another of her children, her daughter
swept on. "John must be crazy, I saw him come in with a--a person--who
never ought to be in a house like this."

"I'd like to know why not?" stormed John. "You don't know a thing about
her. _I_ don't know much for that matter, but when I came across her
down on Union Square, just turned out of a shop where she had been
working, mother, I made up my mind that I would bring her right straight
home, and that Edith would be decent to her. You can see that Edith does
not intend to be."

"But my dear boy," faltered Mrs. Sedyard, "was not that a very reckless
thing to do? I know of an institution where you could send her."

"Oh! yes, yes," said John. "And I suppose I might have handed her over
to a policeman," he added, thinking of his attempt in this direction,
"but I didn't. The sight of her so gentle and uncomplaining in that
awful situation at this time of general rejoicing was too much for me."

He felt this to be so fine a flight and its effect upon Dick was so
remarkable, that he went on in a voice, as his mother always remembered,
"that positively trembled at times."

"How was I, a man strong and well-dowered, to pass heartlessly by like
the Good Samaritan--"

"There's something wrong with that," Dick interposed.

But John was no