"And do you do them all?"

"I do, when there's no one else. Father's men keep leaving." She flung
him a look he would have thought defiant if he hadn't found it frank. "I
don't blame them. Half the time they're not paid."

"I see. So that you fill in. Do you like it?"

"Would you like doing what isn't of any use?--what will never be of any
use? Would you like to be always running as hard as you can, just to
fall out of the race?"

He tried to smile. "I shouldn't like it for long."

"Well, there's that," she said, as though he had suggested a form of
consolation. "It won't be for long. It can't be. Father won't be able to
go on like this."

He decided to take the bull by the horns. "Is that because my father
doesn't want to renew the lease?"

She shrugged her shoulders again. "Oh no, not particularly. It _is_
that--and everything else."

He felt it the part of tact to make signs of going, uttering a few
parting injunctions with regard to the mother as he did so.

"And I wouldn't leave her too much alone," he advised. "She could easily
slip out without attracting any one's attention. Tell your father I said
so. I suppose he's not in the house."

"He's off somewhere trying to engage a night fireman."

He ignored this information to emphasize his counsels. "It's most
important that while she's in this state of mind some one should be with
her. And if we knew of anything she'd specially like--"

She continued to work industriously. "The thing she'd like best in this
world won't do her any good when it happens." She threw in a bulb with
impetuous vehemence. "It's to have Matt out of jail. He will be out in
the course of a few months. But he'll be--a jail-bird."

"We must try to help him live that down."

She turned her great greenish eyes on him again with that look which
struck him as both frank and pitiful. "That's one of the things people
in our position can't do. It's the first thing mother herself will think
of when she sees Matt hanging about the house--for he'll never get a
job."

"He can help your father. He can be the night fireman."

She shrugged her shoulders with the fatalistic movement he was beginning
to recognize. "Father won't need a night fireman by that time."

He could only say: "All the same, your mother must be watched. She can't
be allowed to throw herself from Duck Rock, now, can she?"

"I don't say allowed. But if she did--"

"Well, what then?"

"She'd be out of it. That would