e of itself. Another thing--we want to have as merry a
Christmas as if mother were with us. It's the only thing to do or else
we'll find ourselves morbid and unable to keep going."

Shamed tears were stoically refused entrance into Luke's blue eyes. "I
guess I'll buy you a silver-backed comb and brush. I got some extra
money."

"Oh, Luke--dear!" Mary made the fatal error of trying to hug him. He
wriggled away.

"Trudy never came near us," he said, sternly.

Mary was silent.

"But Mr. O'Valley came like a regular----"

"Don't you think you ought to get to bed?" Mary changed the subject.
"Sleep in the room next to mine if you like."

"When are you coming upstairs?"

"Soon. I want to look over the letters."

Luke rose and pretended a nonchalant stretching.

"Are you going to the office right away?"

"Not until New Year's."

Something in the tired way she spoke evoked Luke's pity and sent him
away to smother his boy-man's grief by promises of a glorious future
in which his sister should live in the lap of luxury.

With its customary shock death had for the time being given Mary a
false estimate of her mother and herself, the usual neurasthenic
experience people undergo at such a time. It seemed, as she sat alone
by the fire, that she must have been a strangely selfish and
ungrateful child who misunderstood, neglected, and underestimated her
mother, and she would be forced to live with reproachful memories the
rest of her days. Each difference of opinion--and there had been
little else--which had risen between them was magnified into brutal
injustice on Mary's part and righteous indignation on her mother's.
This state of mind would find a proper readjustment in time but that
did not comfort Mary at the present moment. Her mother was dead, and
when a mother is gone so is the home unless someone bravely slips into
the absent one's place without delay and assumes its responsibilities
and credits. For Luke's sake this was what Mary had resolved to do.

As she could not sleep she rummaged in a cabinet containing old
letters and mementos, which added fuel to her self-reproach and
misery. She had borne up until now. Mary had always been the sort who
could meet a crisis. Reaction had set in and she felt weak and faulty,
longing for a strong shoulder upon which to cry and be forgiven for
her imagined shortcomings. As she read yellowed letters of bygone days
and lives, finding the record of a baby sister who had live