going to know
you, and I'm glad of the chance."

"Thank you." Doctor Churchill shook hands warmly and went down the
steps. "I will come over for a minute about ten o'clock," he added, "to
make sure that Miss Birch is resting as quietly as we can hope for
to-night."

Lanse watched the broad-shouldered, erect figure cross the lawn and
disappear in the office door of the old house near by; then he turned.

"Well, we're in a sweet scrape now, that's certain," he said gloomily to
himself, as he marched up-stairs.

At the top he encountered his young brother Justin. That twelve-year-old
stood awaiting him, his face so disconsolate that in spite of himself
Lanse smiled.

"Cheer up, youngster," he said. "It's pretty tough, but as Doctor
Forester says, it might be worse. Want to go in with me and see sister a
minute?"

But Justin got hold of his arm and held him back. "Lanse, I've got to
tell you something," he begged. "Please come here, in your room a
minute."

Lanse followed, wondering. Justin, although a healthy and happy boy
enough, was apt to take things seriously, and sometimes needed to be
joked out of singular notions. In Lanse's room Justin carefully locked
the door.

"It's all my fault, Celia's knee," he said, going straight to the point,
as was his way. His voice shook a little, but he went steadily on. "She
sent me down cellar after pickles, and I sat on the top of the stairs
finishing up a banana before I went. I've been down there to look,
and--and the banana skin was there--all mashed. It was what did it."

He choked, and turned away to the window.

"You left a banana skin on those stairs?" Lanse half-shouted.

"Yes."

"Right there, at the top--when Delia almost broke her neck more than
once going down those stairs only last winter, just because they're so
steep and narrow?"

Just nodded.

"And you fell on a banana skin once yourself, and wanted to thrash the
fellow who left it!"

Just's chin sank lower and lower.

Lanse eyed him a moment, struggling with a desire to seize the boy and
punish him tremendously. But as his quick wrath cooled a trifle in his
effort to control himself and act wisely, something about Just's brave
acknowledgment, where silence would have covered the whole thing,
appealed to him. The thought of the way the absent father and mother had
met every confession of his own that he could remember in a life of
prank-playing softened the words which came next to his lips.