in!--could have dropped it when my hat--O come in--ha!
ha!--this isn't a private bedroom; I'm dressed."

XL.

ROUGH GOING

"Ah! Mr. Pettigrew, why'n't you walk right in, sir? I wasn't at prayer."

Mr. Pettigrew, his voice made more than usually ghostly by the wind and
a cold, whispered that he thought he had heard conversation.

"O no, sir, I was only blowing up my assistant for losing a letter. Why,
well, I'll be dog--You picked it up in the street, didn't you? Well, Mr.
Pettigrew, I'm obliged to you, sir. Will you draw up a chair. Take the
other one, sir; I threw that one at a friend the other day and broke
it."

As the school-teacher sat down John dragged a chair close and threw
himself into it loungingly but with tightly folded arms. Dinwiddie
hitched back as if unpleasantly near big machinery. John smiled.

"I'm glad to see you, Mr. Pettigrew. I've been wanting a chance to say
something to you for some time, sir."

Pettigrew whispered a similar desire.

"Yes, sir," said John, and was silent. Then: "It's about my mother, sir.
Your last call was your fourth, I believe." He frowned and waited while
the pipe-clay of Mr. Pettigrew's complexion slowly took the tint of old
red sandstone. Then he resumed: "You used to tell us boys it was our
part not so much to accept the protection of the laws as to protect
them--from their own mistakes no less than from the mistakes of those
who owe them reverence--much as it becomes the part of a man to protect
his mother. Wasn't that it?"

The school-master gave a husky assent.

"Well, Mr. Pettigrew, I'm a man, now, at least bodily--I think. Now, I'm
satisfied, sir, that you hold my mother in high esteem--yes, sir, I'm
sure of that--don't try to talk, sir, you only irritate your throat. I
know you think as I do, sir, that one finger of her little faded hand is
worth more than the whole bad lot of you and me, head, heart, and
heels."

The listener's sub-acid smile protested, but John--

"I believe she thinks fairly well of you, sir, but she doesn't really
know you. With me it's just the reverse. Hm! Yes, sir. You know, Mr.
Pettigrew, my dear mother is of a highly wrought imaginative
temperament. Now, I'm not. She often complains that I've got no more
romance in my nature than my dear father had. She idealizes people. I
can't. But the result is I can protect her against the mistakes such a
tendency might even at this stage of life lead her into, for they say
the