Poor Nettie! she tried to turn comforter; tried to think of one cheering word to say; but what was there to cheer the wife of a drunkard? Or the daughter of a drunkard? Could it be possible that she, Nettie Decker, was that! Oh, dear! how often she had stood in the door, and with a kind of terrified fascination watched Jane Daker stealing home in the darkness, afraid to go in at the front door, lest her drunken father should see her and vent his wrath on her. Could she ever creep around in the dark and hide away from her own father? Wouldn't it be possible for her to go back home? She had not money enough to get there, but couldn't she work somehow, and earn money? She could write a letter to the folks at home and tell them the dreadful story, and they would surely find a way of sending for her. But then, money was not plenty in that home, and she began to understand that they had done a great deal for her, and that it had cost a good deal to pay her fare to this place. She had wondered, at the time, that her father did not send the money for her to come home, but she said to herself: "I suppose he did not know how much it would cost, and he will give it to me to send in my first letter. Perhaps he will give me a little bit more than it costs, too, for a little present for Jamie."

Oh, poor little girl! building hopes on a father like hers. She had not been at home half a day, but she knew now that no money would ever go back to the Marshalls in return for all they had done for her. Worse than that, she might not be able to get back to them herself. Would her father be likely to let her go? He had sent for her, and had told her during this first hour of their meeting, that she had worked for other people long enough. This made her heart swell with indignation.

Done enough for others, indeed! What had they not done for her? She never realized it half so plainly as she did to-night. "I will go back!" she muttered, setting the little bowl she was drying on the table with a determined thump. "I can't stay in such a place as this. I will write to Auntie Marshall this very night if I can get a chance, and she will contrive some way."

Certainly, Nettie in that mood could have no comfort for a weeping mother, and attempted none, after the first murmured word of pity. But meantime she knew very well that she could not go back home that night, and the present terror was, where was she to sleep?

Her mother went back into the bedroom after a few minutes of bitter weeping, and Nettie finished the work, then stood drearily in the doorway, wondering what she could do next, when a good, homely, motherly face looked out of the side window of the small house next their own, and a cheery voice spoke:

"Are you Joe Decker's little Nannie?"

"Yes'm," said Nettie, sadly, wondering drearily, even then, if it could be possible that this was so.

"Well," said the voice, "I calculated that you must be; though I never should have known you in the world, if I hadn't heard you was coming, you was such a mite of a thing when you went away. What a tall nice girl you've got to be. Your ma is sick, the children said. I've been away ironing all day, or I would have been in to see if I could help the poor thing any. I don't know her very much, but she is sickly, and has hard times now and then, and I'm sorry for her. Now what I was wondering is, where are they going to put you to sleep? The upper part of that house ain't finished off, is it? It is one big attic, ain't it, where Norm sleeps? I thought so. I suppose there could be quite a nice room made up there with a little work and a few dollars laid out, but your pa ain't done it, I'll be bound. And I knew there wasn't but one bedroom down-stairs, and I couldn't think how they would manage it."

"It isn't managed at all, ma'am," said Nettie, seeing that she seemed to wait for an answer, and there was nothing to say but the simple truth. "There is no place for me to sleep."

"You don't say! Now that's a shame. Well, now, what I was thinking was, that maybe you would like to sleep in the woodhouse chamber; it is a nice little room as ever was, and it opens right out of my Sarah Ann's room; so you wouldn't be lonesome. I haven't any manner of use for it, now my boy's gone away, and I just as soon you would sleep there as not until your folks get things fixed. You're a dreadful clean-looking little girl, and I like that. I'm a master hand to have clean things around me; Job says he believes I catch the flies and dust their wings before I let them go into my front room. Job is my husband, and that is his little joke at me, you know." And she laughed such a jolly little roly-poly sort of laugh that poor Nettie could not keep a smile from her troubled face. A refuge in the woodhouse chamber of this neat, good-natured-looking woman seemed like a bit of heaven to the homesick child.

"I am very much obliged to you, ma'am," she said respectfully; "I will tell my mother how kind you are, and I think she will be glad to accept the kindness for a few days. I—" and then Nettie suddenly stopped. It might not be well to say to this new friend that she would not need to trouble the woodhouse chamber long, for she meant to start for home as soon as a letter could travel there, and another travel back. Something might come in the way of this resolve, though it made her feel hot all over to think of such a possibility.

"Bless my heart!" said Mrs. Job Smith as Nettie vanished to consult her mother. "If that ain't as polite and pretty-spoken a child as ever I see in my life. She makes me think of our Jerry. To think of that child being Joe Decker's girl and coming back to such a home as he keeps! It is too bad! I am sure I hope they will let her sleep in the woodhouse chamber. It is the only spot where she will get any peace."

Mrs. Decker was only too glad to avail herself of her neighbor's kind offer. "It is good of her," she said gratefully to Nettie. "I wish to the land you could have such a comfortable room all the time; they are real clean-looking folks. You wouldn't suppose from the looks of this house that I cared for clean things, but I do, and I used to have them about me, too. I was as neat once as the best of them; but it takes clothes and soap and strength to be clean, and I have had none of 'em in so long that I have most forgot how to do anything decent."

"Soap?" said Nettie, wonderingly. She was beating up the poor rags which composed the bed in her mother's room, trying to get a little freshness into them.

"Yes, soap; I don't suppose you can imagine how it would seem not to have all the soap you wanted; I couldn't, either, once, but I tell you I save the pennies nowadays for bread, so that I need not see my children starve before my eyes. I would rather do without soap than bread; especially when our clothes are so worn out that there is nothing much to change with. Oh, I tell you when you get into a house where the men folks spend all they can get on beer or whiskey, there are not many pennies left. Mrs. Smith has been real kind; she sent the children in a bowl of soup one day when their father had gone off and not left a thing in the house, nor a cent to get anything with.

"And she has done two or three things like that lately; I'm grateful to her, but I'm ashamed to say so. I never expected to sink so low that I should be glad of the scraps which a poor neighbor like her could send in. Oh, no; they are not very poor. Why, they are rich as kings, come to compare them with us; but they are not grand folks at all; he is a teamster, and works hard every day; so does she; but he doesn't drink a drop, and they have a good many comfortable things. Their boy is away at school, and their girl, Sarah Ann, is learning a dressmaker's trade. You will have a comfortable bed in there, and I'm glad of it."

And now it was eight o'clock. Susie and Sate were asleep in their trundle bed, the tired Nettie having coaxed them to let her give them a splendid bath first, making the idea pleasant to them by producing from her trunk a cunning little cake of perfumed soap. They looked "as pretty as pictures," the sad-eyed mother said, as she bent over them when they were asleep, with their moist hair in loose waves, and their clean faces flushed with health. "They are real pretty little girls," she added earnestly, as she turned away. "He might be proud of them. And he used to be, too. When Sate was a baby, he said she had eyes like you, and he used to kiss her and tell her she was pretty, until I was afraid he would spoil her; but there isn't the least danger of that now. He never notices either of them except to slap them or growl at them."

"How came father to begin to drink?" Nettie asked the question timidly, hesitating over the last word; it seemed such a dreadful word to add to a father's name.

"Don't ask me, child; I don't know. They say he always drank a little; a glass of beer now and then. I knew he did when I married him, but I thought it was no more than all hard-working men did. I never thought much about it. I know it never entered my head that he could be a drunkard. I'd have been too afraid for Norm if I had dreamed of such a thing as that.

"He kept increasing the drinks, little by little—it grows on them, it seems, the habit does; they say that is the way with all the drinks; I didn't know it. I never was taught about these things. If I had been, I think sometimes my life would have been very different. I know I wouldn't have walked right into the fire with my one boy, anyhow. I'm talking to you, child, as though you were a woman grown, and you seem most like a woman to me, you are so handy, and quiet, and nice-looking. I was sorry you were coming, because I thought you would just be an added plague; and now I am sorry for your own sake."

Nettie hesitated greatly over the next question. It was a very hard one to ask this sick and discouraged mother, but she must know the whole of the misery by which she was surrounded. "Does Norman drink too?"

"Norm," said Mrs. Decker, dropping into the one chair, and putting her hand to her heart as though there was something stabbing her there, "Norm has been led away by your father. He was a bright little fellow, and your father took to him amazingly. I used to tell him his own little girls would have reason to be jealous of his step-son. He took Norm with him everywhere, from the first. And taught him to do odd things, for a little fellow, and was proud of his singing, and his speaking, and all that. And when Susie there, was a baby, and I was kept close at home with her, and Norm would tear around in the evening and wake her up, I slipped into the way of letting him go out with your father to spend the evenings; I didn't know they spent them in bar-rooms, or groceries where they sold beer. I never dreamed of such a thing. Your father talked about meeting the men, and I thought they met at some of the houses where there wasn't a baby to cry, and talked their work over, or the news, you know. And there he was teaching Norm to drink. He was a pretty little fellow, and he would sing comic songs, and then they would treat him to the sugar in their glasses! When I found it out, he had got to liking the stuff, and I don't suppose a day goes by without his taking more or less of it now. He never gets as bad as your father; but he will. He is never cross and ugly to me, nor to the children, but he will be. It grows on him. It grows on them all. And to think that I led him into the trap! If I had stayed in the country where I was brought up, or if I had left him with his grandfather, as he wanted me to, he might have been saved. The grandfather is gone now, and so is the farm. Your father got hold of my share of that, and lost it somehow. He didn't mean to, and that soured him, and he drank the harder and we are going down to the very bottom of everything as fast as we can."

It seemed to poor Nettie that they must have reached the bottom now. She could not imagine any lower depths than these.

She made up the poor bed as well as she could, and then went back to the kitchen to see what could be done about breakfast. Her new mother was evidently too weak and sick to be troubled with the thought of it, and while she stayed, Nettie resolved that she would help the poor woman all she could. She went out into the yard to examine, and discovered to her satisfaction that there must be a cooper's shop just around the corner, for the chips lay thick. She gathered some for the morning fire, determined in her mind that she would buy a few potatoes at the grocery in the morning! In the cupboard she had found a cup of sour milk; this she had carefully treasured with an eye to breakfast, and she now looked into her purse to see if she could spare pennies for a quart of flour. If she could, then some excellent cakes would be the result. And now everything that she knew how to do towards the next day's needs was attended to, and she went out in the moonlight, and sat down on the lowest step of the back stoop, and did what she had been longing to do all the afternoon—cried as though her poor young heart was breaking.

Astride a saw-horse in the yard which belonged to Job Smith, and which was separated from the stoop where she sat only by a low fence, was a curly-headed boy, who had come there apparently to whittle and whistle and watch her. He was not there when she sat down and buried her head in her apron. She did not notice his whistling, though he made it loud and shrill on purpose to attract her attention, He knew quite a little about her by this time. He had come upon the boys of the Grammar School in the midst of their afternoon recess and heard Harry Stuart interrupt little Ted Barrows who was the youngest one in the class and wrote the best compositions. They were gathered under a tree listening to Ted, while he read them "The Story of An Hour," which was especially interesting because it had some of their own experiences skilfully woven in.

"Hold on," Harry was saying, just as the whistling boy appeared within hearing. "You didn't make that thing up; you got it from the Deckers; that is what is just going to happen there. Old Joe's Nan is coming home this very day, and she is about as old as the girl you've got in your story, and is freckled, I dare say; most girls are."

"I didn't even know old Joe Decker had a girl to come home!" said little Ted, looking injured. "I made every word of it out of my own mind."

But the boys did not hear him; their interest had been called in another direction. "Is that so? Is Nan Decker coming home? My! What a house to come to. Mother said only yesterday that she hoped the folks who had her would keep her forever. What is she coming for? Who told you?"

"Why, she is coming because Joe thinks that will be another way to plague the old lady. At least that is what my mother thinks. Mrs. Decker told her once that when Joe had been drinking more than usual he always threatened to send for Nan; but she didn't think he would. And now it seems he has. I heard it from the old fellow himself. He was telling Norm about it, while I stood waiting for father's saw. He said she was coming in the stage this afternoon; that she had worked for other folks long enough and it was time he had some good of her himself. I pity her, I tell you."

Then the whistler had come out from behind the trees, and said good-afternoon, and asked a few questions. The boys had answered him civilly enough, but in a way which showed that they did not count him as one of them. The fact was, he was a good deal of a stranger. He had been in town only a few weeks, and he did not go to school, and he boarded with or lived with, the Smiths, who lived next door to the Deckers, and were nice enough people, but did not have much to do with the fathers and mothers of these boys, and—well, the fact was, the boys did not know whether to take this new comer in, and make him welcome, or not. They sort of liked him; he was good-natured, and accommodating so far as they knew, but they knew very little about him. He asked a good many questions about the expected Nan Decker. He had never heard of her before. Since he was to live next door to her, it might be pleasant to know what sort of a person she was. But the boys could tell him very little. Seven years, at their time of life, blots out a good many memories. They only knew that she was Nan Decker who went away when her mother died, and who had lived with the Marshalls ever since; and all agreed in being sorry for her that she was obliged at last to come home.

The whistling boy walked away, after having cross-questioned first one, and then another, and learned that they knew nothing. He was on his way to the woods for one of his long summer rambles. He felt a trifle lonely, and wished that the boys had asked him to sit down under the trees and have a good time with them.

He would have liked to hear Ted's composition, he said to himself; the boy had a sweet face, and a head that looked as though he might be going to make a smart man, one of these days. What was the matter with those fellows, he wondered, that they were not more cordial?

He thought about it quite awhile, then plunged into the mosses and ferns and gathered some lovely specimens, which he arranged in the box he carried slung over his shoulder, and forgot all about the boys, and poor little Nan Decker. On the way home, in the glow of the setting sun, he thought of her again, and wondered if she had come, and if she would be a sorrowful and homesick little girl. It seemed queer to think of being homesick when one came home! But then, it was only a home in name; he had not lived next door to it for five weeks without discovering that, and the little girl's mother was dead! Poor Nan Decker! A shadow came over his bright face for a moment as he thought of this. His mother was dead. He resolved to speak a kind word to the little girl the very first time that he had a chance. And here in the moonlight was his chance.

He stopped whistling at last and spoke: "If it is anything about which I can help, I shall be very glad to do it." A kind, cheerful voice. Nettie looked up quickly and choked back her tears. She was not one to cry, if there were to be any lookers-on.

"I guess you are homesick," said the boy from, his horse's back; "and that isn't any wonder. I'm homesick myself, nearly every night, especially if it is moonlight. I don't know what there is about the moon that chokes a fellow up so, but I've noticed it often; but then I feel all right in the morning."

"Are you away from your home?"

"I should say I was! Or rather home has gone away from me. I haven't any home in particular, only my father, and he is away out in California. I couldn't go there with him, and since my school closed I am waiting here for him to come back. It is home, you know, wherever he is. He doesn't expect to be back yet for months. So you and I ought to be pretty good friends, we are such near neighbors. I live right next door to you. We ought to be introduced. You are Nannie Decker, I suppose, and I am Jerry Mack at your service. I don't wonder you are homesick; folks always are, the first night."

"My name is Nanette," said Nettie, gently, "but people who like me most always say Nettie: and it isn't being homesick that makes me feel so badly—though I am homesick; but it is being scared, and astonished, and, oh! everything. Nothing is as I thought it would be; and there are things about it that I did not understand at all, or maybe I wouldn't have come; and now I am here, I don't know what to do." She was very near crying again, in spite of a watcher.

"I know," he said, nodding his head, and speaking in a grave, sympathetic voice. "Job Smith—that is the man I am staying with—has told me how it used to be with your father. He says he was a very nice father indeed. I am as sorry for you as I can be. But after all, I wouldn't give up if I were you; and I should be real glad that I had come home to help him. He needs a great deal of help. Folks reform, you know. Why, people who are a great deal worse than your father has ever been yet, have turned right around and become splendid men. If I were you I would go right to work to have him reform. Then there's Norm—he needs help, too; and he ought to have it before he gets any older, because it would be so much easier for him to get started right now."

"I don't know the least thing to do," said Nettie; but she dried her eyes on her neat little handkerchief as she spoke, and sat up straight, and looked with earnest eyes at the boy on the other side the fence. This sort of talk interested and helped her.

"No; of course you don't. You haven't studied these things up, I suppose. But there is a great deal to do. My father is a temperance man, and I have heard him talk. I know a hundred things I would like to do, and a few that I can do. I'll tell you what it is, Nettie, say we start a society, you and I, and fight this whole thing?

"We can begin with little bits of plans which we can carry out now, and let them grow as fast as we can follow them and see what we can do. Is it a bargain?"

"There is nothing I would like so well, if you will only show me how," said Nettie, and her eyes were shining.

It was wonderful what a weight these few words seemed to lift from her troubled heart. The boy's face had grown more thoughtful. He seemed in doubt just how to express what he wanted to say next.

"I don't know how you feel about it," he said as last, "but I know somebody who would be sure to help in anything of this kind that we tried to do—show us how, you know, and make ways for us to get money, and all that."

"Who is it?"

Nettie spoke quickly now, for her heart was beating loud and fast. Was there somebody in this town who could be asked to come to the rescue, and who was willing to give such hearty help as that? If such were the case, she could see that a great deal might be accomplished. She waited for her new friend's answer, but he looked down on the stick he was whittling and gravely sharpened the end to a very fine point, before he spoke again.

"I don't know what you think about such things, but I mean—God. I know he is on our side in this business, don't you?"

"Yes," said Nettie, thoughtfully, and her manner changed.

Her voice which had been only eager before, became soft and gentle, and she looked over at the boy in the moonlight and smiled. "I know Him," she said, "and I am His servant. It is strange I forgot for a little while that He knew all about this home, and father, and everything! Maybe He wants me to help father. I mean to begin right away. I will do every single thing I can think of, to keep father, and Norm, and everybody else from drinking liquor any more forever."

There was a sudden spring from the saw-horse, a long step taken over the low fence, and the boy stood beside her.

"There are two of us," he said gravely. "There is my hand on it. I am a Christian, too. And father gave me a verse once, which always helps me when I think of the rumsellers: 'If God be for us, who can be against us!' I know he is for us, and so, though the rumsellers are against us, and think they are going to beat, one of these days he will show them! What you and I want to do is to keep working at it all we can, so as to show that we believe in him."

"Now we are partners—Nettie Decker and Jerry Mack, who knows what we can do? Anyhow, we are friends, and will stand by each other through thick and thin, won't we?"

"Yes," said Nettie, "we will." And she rose up from the doorstep, and they shook hands.