s pay for the thought and the love
and the labor expended, truly.

"Why, everything is right where it belongs! How _wonderfully_ you've
kept house! You must have a perfect jewel of a girl, dad!"

"I let Aunt Lizzie go 'bout three years back," Tom explained. "She
got--shiftless and I been sort of batching it since. Clean, though,
ain't it?"

Barbara turned; blindly she walked to the center table and buried her
face in a bouquet of wild flowers garnered from the yard. She held it
there for a moment before she spoke. "You--didn't even forget that I
love bluebonnets, did you, dad?"

"Pshaw! I 'ain't had much to do but remember what you like, son."

"What's the matter? Business bad?" "Bob's" face was still hidden.

"Oh no! I'm busy as usual. But, now you're home, I'll probably feel
like doing more. I got a lot of work left in me yet, now I got somebody
to work for."

"So you fixed everything with your own hands."

"Sure! I knew how you like the place to look, and--well, a man gets
used to doing without help. The kitchen's clean, too."

Side by side the two moved from room to room, and, once the girl had
regained control of herself, she maintained an admirable
self-restraint. She petted and she cooed over objects dear to her; she
loved every inch of everything; she laughed and she exclaimed, and with
her laughter sunshine suddenly broke into the musty, threadbare
interior for the first time in four years.

"Bob's" room was saved for the last, and Old Tom stood back, glowing at
her delight. He could not refrain from showing her his blackened
thumb-nail--the price of his carpentry--for he hoped she'd kiss it. And
she did. Not until she had "shooed" him out and sent him downstairs,
smiling and chuckling at her radiant happiness, did she give way to
those emotions she had been fighting this long time; then her face grew
white and tragic. "Oh, daddy, daddy!" she whispered. "What _have_ I
done to you?"

Tom Parker had raised his girl like a son, and like a son she took hold
of things, but with a daughter's tact. Her intuition told her much, but
she did not arrive at a full appreciation of the family affairs until
she had the house running and went down to put his office in order.
Then, indeed, she learned at what cost had come those four expensive
years in the East, and the truth left her limp. She went through Tom's
dusty, disordered papers, ostensibly rearranging and filing them, and
they told her much; what they di