what wasn't a very easy part of her life. So he
stayed yet a little longer. And presently he found that he was in
danger of something happening. He had never been very good at making
himself feel as he wished to feel, or at holding his feelings to what
they should be, let us say. And his feelings for this little daughter
were not quite, he was afraid, like a father's. But he still did not
know what to do, Marjorie. She would never care, and there were
reasons why he did not want or expect her to. It was only that he
wondered which was right--which he ought to do."

Pennington stopped.

Marjorie colored up.

"What--what do you mean? Why--why do you tell me about it?"

"Because," said Pennington, "I would like to know what you think that
man ought to do. Ought he to go back home, against his people's wish,
but where he belongs, and try to pick up the rest of his life there, or
do you think that the need of him over here is enough to counterbalance
the danger he runs? You see, it's rather a problem."

Marjorie was a perfectly intelligent girl. She knew very well that
Pennington was, at last, telling her the outlines of his own pitiful
story. And he was leaving the decision in her hands.

She sat quietly for awhile, and tried to think. It was hard to think,
because there was a queer, hazy feeling in her head, and her hands were
hot. She had felt unusually excited and energetic and gay earlier in
the day, but that was all gone, and only the hazy feeling left. She
did not want to move, or, particularly, to speak. She wondered if a
trip she had made that afternoon before to a little swampy place, where
she had sat and strung berries for an hour, had been bad for her.

But there was Pennington--he looked very large, suddenly, and then
seemed to fade away far off for a minute, and have to be focused with
an effort--and he had to be answered.

"I think," she said hesitatingly, "that he ought to do what seemed to
him right, without thinking of his feelings, or--or any one else's."

"But that's just the trouble. He couldn't see which _was_ right."

Marjorie tried to focus harder than ever. She wanted to be unselfish,
and tell him the thing that was right to do, at any cost--though she
had not realized how much Pennington's help and society had been to
her. She felt a terror at the idea of his going, the more because she
felt ill. But that didn't count--that mustn't count. You have no
right to let a m