, and flung a silent
white arm slipping from her sleeve loose around his neck, and pulled
his head to her shoulder. "Now look here, father," she said, "you've
been through lots to-day, and you'd better go to bed and go to
sleep. I don't think mother was waked up--if she had been, she would
have been out here."

"Look here, Ellen, I want to tell you," Andrew began, pitifully. He
was catching his breath like a child with sobs.

"I don't want to hear anything," replied Ellen, firmly. "Whatever
you did was right, father."

"I ought to tell you, Ellen!"

"You ought to tell me nothing," said Ellen. "You are all tired out,
father. You can't do anything that isn't right for me. Now go to bed
and go to sleep."

Ellen stroked her father's thin gray hair with exactly the same
tender touch with which he had so often stroked her golden locks. It
was an inheritance of love reverting to its original source. She
kissed him on his lined forehead with her flower-like lips, then she
pushed him gently away. "Go softly, and don't wake mother,"
whispered she; "and, father, there's no need to trouble her with
this. Good-night."

Chapter XXXIV

Ellen's deepest emotion was pity for her father, so intense that it
was actual physical pain.

"Poor father! Poor father! He had to borrow the money to buy me my
watch and chain," she kept repeating to herself. "Poor father!"

To her New England mind, borrowing seemed almost like robbing. She
actually felt as if her father had committed a crime for love of
her, but all she looked at was the love, not the guilt. Suddenly a
conviction which fairly benumbed her came over her--the money in the
savings-bank; that little hoard, which had been to the imagination
of herself and her mother a sheet-anchor against poverty, must be
gone. "Father must have used if for something unbeknown to mother,"
she said to herself--"he must, else he would not have told Mr.
Evarts that he could not pay him." It was a hot night, but the girl
shivered as she realized for the first time the meaning of the wolf
at the door. "All we've got left is this house--this house
and--and--our hands," thought Ellen. She saw before her her father's
poor, worn hands, her mother's thin, tired hands, jerking the thread
in and out of those shameful wrappers; then she looked at her own,
as yet untouched by toil, as white and small and fair as flowers.
She thought of the four years before her at college, four years
before she c