use when pa's good he's real good, and so kind it makes it hurt all
the more when he's off. Oh dear!" She gave a long sigh, pitifully
unyouthful in its depth of misery. "I was 'most glad when ma got through
with it all, and could rest and look so sort of peaceful in her coffin.
But I dunno. She kept more offen me than I knew of, I guess, and it's
growin' worse all the time."

Nate started up, letting his chair fall back with such force as to
threaten total extinction to its legs.

"It's a sin and shame, and I know it!" he said in his deepest voice.
"But you keep up your courage, Lucy. When things 'gets to the bottom
they're bound to go up again, for they never stand still."

He stood up and knocked his pipe clean against the wooden chair seat
with vigorous thumps that seemed to relieve him, and started towards the
street.

"Where you going?" asked Lucy remonstrantly. "I didn't mean to nag at
you, Nate."

"Don't I know it? And what if you did? Guess I'm big enough to stand it.
You just talk to me all you feel like; but see here, little girl, I
wouldn't be talkin' to nobody else--I wouldn't."

"Not to Marry?"

"Oh well, that French woman don't so much matter, 'cause most folks
wouldn't understand even if she tried to tattle, and I guess she don't.
But not to Mis' Hemphill--she's a most su'prisin' gossip, ye know--nor
to the Murfrees, nor Flahertys, nor nobody. These is fam'ly affairs,
Lucy, and they ain't for public ears. I'm going down to Lon's now, and
your pa'll get home soon--very soon. I'll see to that," grimly. "Now,
good night, and don't you shed another tear, will ye?"

He patted her shoulder kindly as he stepped past her, and Lucy looked up
with grateful eyes.

"If he's off, Nate, will you come with him?" she whispered fearfully.

"Bet yer life!" was the emphatic answer as he lumbered away on great
clumping shoes, true knight as any that used to ride away on a horse
just as clumsily arrayed in armor, and perhaps that romantic rider was
no better equipped in mind or heart than this glass-blower of the
nineteenth century.

CHAPTER VIII.

LITTLETON REVIEWED.

There never was a truth more tersely expressed than in the vulgar old
proverb, "Money makes the mare go." Before Joyce's energy and Joyce's
dollars work progressed with rapid strides, and Littleton, as seen on a
certain June morning of that year, would never have suggested the bare,
ugly collection of buildings she had visited the March