hen. Though he was a big
man, he was not so big as the other, who towered above the dried
cat-tails in a china vase on the mantelpiece.

"Are you sure they did not pass here?" asked the stranger, and as he
turned his head the dried pollen was loosened from the cat-tails and
drifted in an ashen dust to the hearth.

"No, I'll stake my word on that. They ain't passed here yet," replied my
father.

With an angry gesture the other shook his rubber coat over our bright
little carpet, and passed out again, slamming the door violently behind
him. Running to the window, I lifted the green shade, and watched his
big black figure splashing recklessly through the heavy puddles under
the faint yellowish glimmer of the street lamp at the comer. The light
flickered feebly on his rubber coat and appeared to go out in the
streams of water that fell from his shoulders.

When I looked round I saw that the woman had come back into the room,
still grasping the little girl by the hand.

"No, no, I must go at once. It is necessary that I should go at once,"
she repeated breathlessly, looking up in a dazed way into my mother's
face.

"If you must you must, an' what ain't my business ain't," replied my
mother a trifle sharply, while she wrapped a grey woollen comforter of
her own closely over the head and shoulders of the little girl, "but if
you'd take my advice, which you won't, you'd turn this minute an' walk
straight back home to yo' husband."

But the woman only shook her head with its drenched mass of soft brown
hair.

"We must go, Sally, mustn't we?" she said to the child.

"Yes, we must go, mamma," answered the little girl, still grasping the
stem of the red geranium between her fingers.

"That bein' the case, I'll get into my coat with all the pleasure in
life an' see you safe," remarked my father, with a manner that impressed
me as little short of the magnificent.

"But I hate to take you away from home on such a terrible night."

"Oh, don't mention the weather," responded my gallant parent, while he
struggled into his rubber shoes; and he added quite handsomely, after a
flourish which appeared to set the elements at defiance, "arter all,
weather is only weather, mum."

As nobody, not even my mother, was found to challenge the truth of this
statement, the child was warmly wrapped up in an old blanket shawl, and
my father lifted her in his arms, while the three set out under a big
cotton umbrella for the brow of the hi