waited
anxiously, and then asked:

"Won't you tell me all?"

"No; I can't!"

George shuddered, and at that moment Bess came in, bearing a tray with
toast and eggs and coffee. Mrs. Hardy left Bess to look after her
brother, and went out of the room almost abruptly. George looked
ashamed, and, after eating a little, told Bess to take the things away.
She looked grieved, and he said:

"Can't help it; I'm not hungry. Besides, I don't deserve all this
attention. Say, Bess, is father still acting under his impression, or
dream, or whatever it was?"

"Yes, he is," replied Bessie, with much seriousness; "and he is ever so
good now, and kisses mother and all of us good-bye in the morning; and
he is kind and ever so good. I don't believe he is in his right mind.
Will said yesterday he thought father was _non campus meant us_; and
then he wouldn't tell me what it meant; but I guess he doesn't think
father is just right intellectually."

Now and then Bess got hold of a big word and used it for all it would
bear. She said "intellectually" over twice, and George laughed a
little; but it was a bitter laugh, not such as a boy of his age has any
business to possess. He lay down and appeared to be thinking, and,
after a while, said aloud:

"I wonder if he wouldn't let me have some money while he's feeling that
way?"

"Who?" queried Bess. "Father?"

"What! you here still, Curiosity? Better take these things downstairs!"

George spoke with his "headache tone," as Clara called it, and Bess,
without reply, gathered up the tray things and went out, while George
continued to figure out in his hardly yet sober brain the possibility
of his father letting him have more money with which to gamble.

In the very next room Mrs. Hardy kneeled in an agony of petition for
that firstborn son, crying out of her heart, "O God, it is more than I
can bear! To see him growing away from me so! Dear Lord, be Thou
merciful to me. Bring him back again to the life he used to live! How
proud I was of him! What a joy he was to me! And now, and now! O
gracious Father, if Thou art truly compassionate, hear me! Has not
this foul demon of drink done harm enough? And yet it still comes, and
even into my home! Ah, I have been indifferent to the cries of other
women, but now it strikes me! Spare me, great and powerful Almighty!
My boy! my heart's hunger is for him! I would rather see him dead than
see him as I saw him last night. Spar