rom her halcyon days of hope.

And the household needed money, too. After that regrettable interview
with Snowden, the catastrophe in the tea and coffee business came with
the swiftness of long-delayed fate. One morning Horatio did not rise
from the breakfast table, as had been his wont for so many years, and
throwing out his chest with the sensual satisfaction of the well-fed
male shout boisterously:--

"Good-by, folks, I must be off to the office!"

For there was no longer any office to go to.

Instead, Horatio sat glumly at the table reading the want columns of the
morning paper, down and up, and then as the morning wore on he silently
departed for the city--"to look for something." Hopeless task, when the
streets were filled with men out of work, and businesses everywhere were
closing down and turning off old employees. Milly, watching Horatio
reach gropingly for his hat and coat, like a stricken animal, realized
that her father was no longer young and brave. He had passed fifty,--the
terrible deadline in modern industry. "Nobody wants an old dog, any
way," he said to his mother forlornly.

Then Milly was almost sorry for what she had done. But it was not really
her fault, she still thought.

It was a mournful experience, this, of having a grown man--the one male
of the family--sitting listlessly about the house of a morning and going
forth aimlessly at irregular times, only to return before he should be
expected. The habit of her life, as it had been the habit of Horatio's,
was to have the male sally forth early from the domestic hearth and
leave it free to the women of the family for the entire day.... Usually
optimistic to a fault, with a profound conviction that things must come
right of themselves somehow, Milly began to doubt and see dark visions
of the family future. What if her father should be unable to find
another place--any sort of work--and should come to hang about the house
always, getting seedier and sadder, to be supported by her feeble
efforts? Milly refused to contemplate the picture.

One day her grandmother asked money from Milly. The old lady was a grim
little nemesis for the girl these days,--a living embodiment of "See
what you have done," though never for a moment would Milly admit that
she was responsible for the accumulation of disaster. It should be said
in behalf of Grandma Ridge that now the blow of fate had fallen, which
she had so persistently predicted for four long years, she