people to like instead of disliking you. Well, the quickest way
is to find out what they want, and do it, forgetting yourself; and then,
perhaps quite suddenly, you will wake up and discover not only that people
like you already, but that you yourself are full of a happiness you can't
explain."

The gust of his sobbing grew calmer by degrees. He lifted his head a
little, but not to look her in the face.

"Is that puzzling to you?" she asked. "Well, then, just give it a small
trial in practice, and see how it works. I want you, for instance, to
learn those verses. You don't like them; but by learning them you will
please me, and you want to please me. Try now!"

He pulled the book towards him and bent over it, his head between his
hands. After three or four minutes he stood up, red-eyed and a little
defiant--

"'I saw the new moon late yestreen,
Wi' the auld moon in her arm;
And if we gang to sea, master,
I fear we'll come to harm.'"

"They hadna sail'd a league, a league,
A league but barely ane--"

Hester listened with eyes withdrawn, in delicacy avoiding to meet his
tear-reddened ones; and just then from the upper floor a scream rang
through the house--a child's scream.

Master Calvin heard it, and broke off with a grin.

"That will be Myra," he announced. "She's catching it!"

Had she been less distraught, Hester might have marked and sighed over his
sudden relapse into odiousness. But she had risen with a white face; for
scream folllowed scream overhead, and the sound tortured her.

"You don't tell me,"--she began, putting up both hands to her ears.
"No, no--there has been some accident! The poor child is calling for
help!"

She ran out of the parlour, up the two flights of stairs and along a dark
winding corridor, still guided by the screams. At the end of the corridor
she found Susannah, pale, wringing her hands, outside a door which,
however, she made no attempt to enter.

"Oh, miss, he's killing her!"

"Is the door locked?" panted Hester, at the same time flinging her weight
against it as she turned the handle. It flew open, and she confronted--
not Myra, but Mr. Sam.

He stood between her and the window with an arm uplifted and in his hand a
leathern strap; and while she recoiled for an instant, the strap descended
across the naked back and shoulders of little Clem, who drooped under it
with bowed knees, helpless, his arms extended, his wrists b