t a philosopher, but a sentimentalist.

"If mother doesn't think it's sensible, why do it, father?" asked Zoe
anxiously, looking up into her father's face.

She had seen the look in her mother's eyes, and also she had no love for
her grandfather. Her instinct had at one time wavered regarding him; but
she had seen an incident with a vanished female cook, and though she had
not understood, a prejudice had been created in her mind. She was always
contrasting him with M. Fille, who, to her mind, was what a grandfather
ought to be.

"I won't have him beholden to you," said Carmen, almost passionately.

"He is of my family," said Jean Jacques firmly and chivalrously. "There
is no question of being beholden."

"Let well enough alone," was the gloomy reply. With a sigh, Jean Jacques
turned back to the study of the road before him, to gossip with Zoe, and
to keep on planning subconsciously the new things he must do.

Carmen sighed too, or rather she gave a gasp of agitation and annoyance.
Her father? She had lost whatever illusion once existed regarding him.
For years he had clung to her--to her pocket. He was given to drinking
in past years, and he still had his sprees. Like the rest of the world,
she had not in earlier years seen the furtiveness in his handsome face;
but at last, as his natural viciousness became stereotyped, and bad
habits matured and emphasized, she saw beneath his mask of low-class
comeliness. When at last she had found it necessary to dismiss the best
cook she ever had, because of him, they saw little of each other. This
was coincident with his failure at the ash-factory, where he mismanaged
and even robbed Jean Jacques right and left; and she had firmly insisted
on Jean Jacques evicting him, on the ground that it was not Sebastian
Dolores' bent to manage a business.

This little episode, as they drove home from Vilray, had an unreasonable
effect upon her.

It was like the touch of a finger which launches a boat balancing in the
ways onto the deep. It tossed her on a sea of agitation. She was swept
away on a flood of morbid reflection.

Her husband and her daughter, laughing and talking in the front seat of
the red wagon, seemed quite oblivious of her, and if ever there was
a time when their influence was needed it was now. George Masson was
coming over late this afternoon to inspect the work he had been doing;
and she was trembling with an agitation which, however, did not show
upon the surface