d for the first
time since we have met him seemed completely to fill his checked
ready-made suit.

"Send Kippy to a lunatic asylum!" he said in tones so indignant that
they made his chin tremble. "You will do nothing whatever of the kind!
Why, all she's ever had in the world was her pa and Aunt Tish and her
home; now he's gone, you ain't wanting to take the others away from her
too, are you?"

"Well, who is going to take care of her?" demanded Ben angrily.

"I am," announced D. Webster, striking as fine an attitude as ever his
illustrious predecessor struck; "you take the money that's in the bank,
and leave me the house and Kippy. That'll be her share and mine. I can
take care of her; I don't ask favors of nobody. Suppose I do lose my
job; I'll get me another. There's a dozen ways I can make a living.
There ain't a man in the State that's got more resources than me. I got
plans laid now that'll revolutionize--"

"Yes," said Ben, quietly, "you always could do great things."

D. Webster's egotism, inflated to the utmost, burst at this prick, and
he suddenly collapsed. Dropping limply into the chair by the table, he
held his hand over his mouth to hide his agitation.

"There's--there's one thing," he began, swallowing violently, and
winking after each word, "that I--I can't do--and that's to leave
a--sister--to die--among strangers."

And then, to his mortification, his head went unexpectedly down upon his
arms, and a flood of tears bedimmed the radiance of his twenty-five-cent
four-in-hand.

From far down the river came the whistle of the boat, and, in the room
below, Jimmy Fallows removed a reluctant ear from the stove-pipe hole.

"Melindy," he said confidentially, entirely forgetting the late frost,
"I never see anybody in the world that stood as good a show of gittin'
the fool prize as that there D. Opp."

IV

The old Opp House stood high on the river-bank and gazed lonesomely out
into the summer night. It was a shabby, down-at-heel, dejected-looking
place, with one side showing faint lights, above and below, but the
other side so nailed up and empty and useless that it gave the place the
appearance of being paralyzed down one side and of having scarcely
enough vitality left to sustain life in the other.

To make matters worse, an old hound howled dismally on the door-step,
only stopping occasionally to paw at the iron latch and to whimper for
the master whose unsteady footsteps he had followed f