selling books, maps and sewing machines. Her
devotion to those brothers was of course splendid, yet I now think that
Wilma, temperamental and overworked, had let it become a kind of
monomania with her.

A few days after she came to board at the old Squire's--all the
school-teachers boarded there--Addison said to me that he wondered what
that girl had on her mind.

As the summer passed, Wilma Emmons came to know our affairs at the old
farm very well, and of course heard about Jim and his bank book. Jim, in
fact, had taken one of his playdays soon after she came; and grandmother
asked Wilma to lock the book up in the drawer of her desk at the
schoolhouse for a few days.

It was quite like Jim Doane's impulsive nature, already somewhat
unbalanced by intoxicants, to be greatly attracted to the reserved Miss
Emmons. Out by the garden gate one morning he rather foolishly made his
admiration known to her. Addison and I were weeding a strawberry bed
just inside the fence and could not avoid overhearing something of what
passed.

Astonished and a little indignant, too, perhaps, Miss Emmons told Jim
that a young man of his habits had no right to address himself in such a
manner to any young woman.

"But I can reform!" Jim said.

"Let folks see that you have done so, then," Miss Emmons replied, and
added that a young man who could not be trusted with his own bank book
could hardly be depended on to make a home.

It is quite likely that Jim brooded over the rebuff; he was surly for a
week afterwards. Then, like the weakling that he had become, he stole
away for another playday; and again grandmother, with Theodora's and
Miss Emmons's connivance, hid the book, this time somewhere in the
wagon-house cellar.

Jim did not come home to demand his book, however; in fact, he did not
come back at all. Shame perhaps restrained him. When on the third day
the old Squire drove down to the village to get him, he found that Jim
had gone to Bangor with two disreputable cronies.

A week or two passed, and then came a somewhat curt letter from Jim,
asking grandmother to send his bank book to him at Oldtown, Maine. The
letter put grandmother in a great state of mind, and she declared
indignantly that she would not send it. In truth, we were all certain
that now Jim would squander his savings in the worst possible way; but
when another letter came, again demanding the book, the old Squire
decided that we must send it.

"The poor fellow