then
everything was quiet.

She tiptoed into the room, and sat down on the floor, and looked at
the back of the chair in utter distress. She could see her father's
elbow projecting on one side, but nothing more. For an instant
she hoped that he wasn't there--hoped that he had gone--but then,
terrified, she knew that this was a piece of extreme wickedness.

So she lay on the rough carpet, sobbing hopelessly, and seeing real
and vicious devils of her brother's imagining in all the corners of
the room.

Presently, in her misery, she remembered a packet of acid-drops that
lay in her pocket, and drew them forth in a sticky mass, which parted
from its paper with regret. So she choked and sucked her sweets at
the same time, and found them salt and tasteless.

Ray was gone a long time, and she was a wicked girl who would go to
hell if she didn't do what he told her. Those were her prevailing
ideas.

And presently there came a third. Ray had said that if her father
woke up he would run away, and not go to hell at all. Now if she woke
him up--.

She knew this was dreadfully naughty; but her mind clung to the idea
obstinately. You see, father had always been so fond of mother, and
he would not like to be in a different place. Mother wouldn't
like it either. She was always so sorry when father did not come home
or anything. And hell is a dreadful place, full of things. She half
convinced herself, and started up, but then there came an awful
thought.

If she did this she would go to hell for ever and ever, and all the
others would be in heaven.

She hung there in suspense, sucking her sweet and puzzling it over
with knit brows.

How can one be good?

She swung round and looked in the dark corner by the piano; but the
Devil was not there.

And then she ran across the room to her father, and shaking his arm,
shouted, tremulously--

"Wake up, father! Wake up! The police are coming!"

And when the police came ten minutes later, accompanied by a very
proud and virtuous little boy, they heard a small shrill voice
crying, despairingly--

"The police, father! The police!"

But father would not wake.

The Biography Of A Superman

"O limed soul that struggling to be free
Art more engaged!"

Charles Stephen Dale, the subject of my study, was a dramatist
and, indeed, something of a celebrity in the early years of the
twentieth century. That he should be already completely forgotten is
by no means astonishing