When the other children began making preparations to go home, Elizabeth Spellman whispered to Junior to wait. After the last one had disappeared, she went to the kitchen and returned with a plate piled high with remaining refreshments, a heaped dish of ice cream and a generous big piece of cake.

Junior was not particularly grateful. There had been set before him, all his life, more excellent food than his stomach could hold. The delicacies that would have been a great treat to any of the other boys, were no particular treat to Junior; while he was sufficiently his father’s son to allow the Spellmans to see that he was not deeply impressed. He picked over the food in a listless manner and ate very little either of the cream or the cake. In truth, he was sorely surprised and disappointed over the intrusion of the little gold bird on an occasion when he had reckoned on carrying off the honours with greater ease than usual. He was slightly older than Mahala and his brain was working with undue rapidity. He knew every one in Ashwater whom he chose to know—where had he seen birds being raised? In those days linnet and canary culture was extremely common. Almost every one had the tiny domestic singers in their homes. Brooding about the bird made him cross and sullen as he always was when he was thwarted.

Watching her mother’s efforts to placate Junior, Mahala did some rapid thinking on her own part. She decided that if he left the house feeling better, there would be fewer objections on the part of her parents to her keeping the bird. She followed Junior to the hall door, then stepped on the veranda with him, where she stood for an instant in the moonlight.

The night was October at its most luring period. Natural conditions, not Junior, were responsible for the fact that she went down the front steps beside him, swung open the gate herself, then stood back that he might step through. As she closed it, she paused a moment longer, looking around her. The lure of the night air, of gaudy foliage wonderful in the white light, was upon her.

She said to Junior: “Did you ever see a more entrancing night?”

But Junior leaned across the gate, caught her by the shoulders, and roughly demanded: “Which of the fellows sent that bird to you?”

Mahala’s lithe body straightened under his fingers. She had been carefully bred all her life; she thoroughly understood that her parents expected her not to antagonize Junior.

So she said, very simply: “I don’t know. Some friend of Father or Mother, maybe.”

Junior’s hands gripped tighter. Suddenly he was saying in a hoarse voice that sounded as if he were going to cry very shortly: “I want you to understand that you are my girl, and when we finish school, we are going to be married!”

Mahala attempted to draw back, crying: “No! No, Junior! What foolishness! We are nothing but children.”

But Junior tightened his grasp, and drawing her toward him, he leaned over and kissed her.

At that instant Mahlon Spellman appeared in his doorway. He was in time to glimpse a flying missile that came hurtling through the air, striking Junior a hard blow on the side of the head, knocking him down. He heard Mahala’s shrill scream and saw her throw open the gate to kneel beside the boy. He paused long enough to call his wife, then rushed to help Junior to his feet.

The boy was half dazed. His head was cut and bleeding. As he recovered from the shock of the blow, he grew wild with rage and excitement. Mahala hurried to the kitchen to summon Jemima Davis and for a few minutes all of them were rushing through the house for water, bandages, camphor, and first aids. Mahala, standing beside the couch upon which he was lying, watched her mother’s deft fingers exploring his temple. A rush of colour stained her white face when the verdict came: “It is nothing but a very bad bruise.”

Instantly her head lifted and tilted in one of the bird-like movements familiar with her from childhood. Her mother was fully occupied; her father was chafing Junior’s hands, trying to quiet him. Jemima was holding the basin in which Mrs. Spellman was dipping cloths to staunch the blood and cleanse the wound. To all of them in general Mahala announced: “I will bring some dry towels,” as she slipped from the room.

She ran to the kitchen where she made a quick survey of everything. Then she caught up a box standing on a table and hastily, with flying fingers, she packed into it biscuit, slices of pressed chicken, pieces of cake—everything she could snatch from the remains of the lunch that had been served her guests. Then she darted from the back door, down the steps, and made her way among the shrubbery screening the side parlour window.

“Jason!” she breathed softly. “Jason!”

At once the bushes parted and Jason stood by her side. She thrust the box into his hands.

Her face was very near to his in order that he might hear her breathless whisper: “Can they ever find out where that bird came from?”

Jason’s voice was dry and breathless, too, as he answered: “They never can. It didn’t come from this town.”

“Run!” urged Mahala. “The minute Junior feels better Father will be searching the shrubbery and the neighbourhood. Run!”

Then she was gone.

Jason stood still, holding the box. His heart was pounding until he had to grip tight to keep from dropping his gift. He could still feel her breath on his cheek. He could hear the shaken voice. In his nostrils was the odour of her nearness, of food that she had thrust into his hands. All this was a miracle straight from heaven, but there was a greater far—an overwhelmingly greater. She had not said one word of condemnation; she had neither chided nor reproached him.

Jason raised his head and tested his shoulders. Gripping the box carefully, he went down the Spellman back walk, through the gate, and then he entered a gate opposite, and skirting a house, came out on the adjoining side of the block. From there on, with no particular haste, he made his way home.

It would be closer truth to state that his feet made their way home; his brain knew very little about where he was going or why. He had given Mahala a gift. He had seen it in her arms. He had heard her voice crying out before every one that she loved it. He had punished Junior Moreland’s rudeness and roughness. She had known that he had done it, and she had not even mentioned the fact that she knew.

When he reached home, Jason sat on the back steps in the beneficence of the October moon, and with the box on his knees, stared up at the sky. He was trying, with all his might, to understand what had happened, and how it had happened, and why. There had been no time to think. From the branches of a maple tree he had watched the progress of Mahala’s party, even as he had watched hundreds of other parties from trees and bushes, all his lonely, neglected childhood. He had seen Mahala’s trip to the gate with Junior. He had heard what they said; had seen Junior’s rude act. He had had no time to think; he had followed an animal impulse. Of all the town Mahala was the one creature in woman’s form who had been truly kind to him, who had tried to make him feel that he was not an outcast, who had put into his heart the thought, that if he would culture himself and do what was right, he might have an equal chance with other men when he grew up. When she was offended and had cried out, Jason had bridged space with a piece of brick wrenched from the wall of a flower bed beside which he had landed as he slid from the tree. When he saw Junior fall, he had been paralysed. He had not known but that he must go in the house and admit that he had killed him, until Mahala stood near offering him food, urging his flight to safety.

Jason studied the moon critically. He had never before realized that it was so big, that it seemed so close, that with his unassisted eyes he could trace the conformations upon it. Then he told the moon his secret.

“When she has time to study this over, she will think I am a coward to have thrown the brick. I should have overtaken him and beaten him with my fists.”

Sick with shame and humiliation, Jason pondered deeply on the subject and made his high resolve. Hereafter, he would not be afraid. Hereafter, he would not be ashamed. He would do the level best that was in his power and some day, in some way, there would be a turning. Things would come right for him.

Resolves are wonderful. They brace mentality and the physical being as well. The odour of tempting food persisted, and still watching the moon, listening to the sounds of night, surrounded by the silver silence lightly flecked by the softly dropping gold and red leaves, Jason had his first experience with really delicious food, delicately prepared.

When he had finished the last crumb, he carried the box to the small, ramshackle woodhouse beside the back walk and dropped it behind a pile of split wood. Then he softly opened the back door and started to climb the stairs. Marcia’s voice stopped him.

“Jason,” she called through the darkness, “what made you so late?”

Jason stood still an instant, then he answered her: “I helped Peter Potter in the grocery for a while. I’ve laid the money I earned on the kitchen table for you.” He hesitated an instant longer before he added: “And then, for a little while, I watched a party through a window.”

He stood still, waiting, but as there was no comment, he climbed the stairs and sat down on the side of his old bed. Through the open window he began another review of what had happened, thinking things out in clearer detail, reasoning, studying, planning, and in his heart—hoping. He tried to picture what was going on in the Spellman home at that minute. He had a vision of Junior, cleansed and bandaged, making his way home in the white heat of anger.

But his vision was not nearly adequate. Junior was so dizzy that he could not stand, even when he tried bravely. Preceded by Jemima carrying a lantern, Mahlon Spellman entered his barn and harnessed his horse. If Mahlon had been asked to describe his feelings, he would have announced that he was outraged. He hated blood; he had hated it all his life. It was one of the things that he had given the widest berth possible. To-night he had been forced to come into actual contact with it. He hated mystery as badly as he hated blood, and who had sent that wonderful little bird that sang its way across his threshold and won his daughter’s affections so easily, was a mystery. Really, it probably had been the cause of the whole trouble, and certainly it was sufficient trouble that a man of his position, of his dignity, should be forced at ten o’clock at night, an ungodly hour, to enter his stable to harness a horse. He had not dared take the time to change his clothing, and if there was anything on earth Mahlon hated worse than any other thing that could happen to clothing, it was stepping into a stable in the shoes and suit that he wore upon the streets. But he was afraid to wait to make the change for fear that Junior would realize what he was doing, while he was almost sick with fear that the boy might be seriously hurt. Even if Elizabeth could feel no yielding bones, no ragged seam, that was no guarantee that there might not be ruptured blood vessels or a clot forming inside the skull.

With shaking fingers Mahlon got the abominable harness upon the abomination of a horse and led it to the front door; and there, helped in by Jemima and Mrs. Spellman, Junior leaned against the carriage seat, which there was every probability he would stain and disfigure, and was driven home.

With shaking fingers Mahlon tied the horse at the Moreland hitching post. With wavering legs he travelled the length of the walk and rang the doorbell. He could see through the lighted windows that the Morelands had not yet retired. He wondered why they were up so late when they were not having a party; and he wondered what he was going to say, and he wondered how he was going to say it. He had no idea what Junior would tell his parents. He had a very clear idea that he wanted them told nothing that would be detrimental to his standing with them. Too frequently he needed the accommodations of the banker when he bought heavy consignments of dry goods in the East; often he needed ready money when he speculated on bits of delinquent land or town properties that he thought a bargain.

Martin Moreland opened his front door. He and Mahlon Spellman had been boys together in the same village. They knew each other thoroughly, but they were not particularly well acquainted. Mahlon Spellman had been a boy as fastidious as the man he became later, while Martin Moreland had been the same kind of boy that developed the man he now was. There always had been sufficient reason why neither of them swam in the same bend of the river or climbed the same trees to gather nuts. Mahlon had done precious little of either.

Each man in his own way thought himself the great man of Ashwater. Each in his own way would have been better pleased to have witnessed the downfall of the other than anything else that could have happened on earth. For this reason, they were always particularly courteous to each other, always giving the impression in public that they were friends.

Seeing Mr. Spellman standing, white and shaken at his door, produced a throb of primitive joy in the heart of Martin Moreland. Perhaps he needed money. Possibly this time he could be hopelessly involved. He thrust forth his hand and cried in his most genial voice: “Why, Mahlon, what brings you out at this time of night? I had thought respectable people like you would have been in bed!”

Mahlon opened his lips in the hope, that as a result of his exemplary life, something exemplary would issue therefrom of its own accord, because he had no idea what to say. There was nothing sharper in Ashwater County than the eyes of Martin Moreland; by this time they had looked past Mahlon, down the length of the walk, and visualized the conveyance at the gate and the bandaged head it contained.

“You don’t mean to tell me,” he cried roughly, “that you have brought Junior home with a broken head! I didn’t know you were having a prize fight. I thought I was sending the boy to a civilized entertainment!”

Mrs. Moreland could not have been very far in the offing. At Junior’s name she hurried down the hall and caught Mahlon’s arm.

“Is Junior hurt?” she demanded.

Mahlon’s soul was in rebellion. He never had thrown a brick in all his immaculate life. Why any one who had known him all his life should assume that he would, or that he might be held responsible for bricks thrown by any one else, was beyond his comprehension. It was such pure insanity that he lost all respect for any one who could harbour such a delusion. It gave him the proper mental ballast and spinal reinforcement. He straightened himself, removed his hat, and stroked his sleeve. In his most correct and elaborate manner he answered very quietly, and congratulated himself even as he heard the sound of his own voice that it was clear and even, without a tremor. He wondered how this could happen when his heart was pounding until he had instinctively covered it with his hat.

“I regret to inform you that some roustabout in the street threw a piece of brick as Junior was leaving my gate this evening. He is slightly cut on the temple, but nothing of any moment. Barring a sore head, he will be as usual in the morning, I am quite sure.”

“But why should any one throw a brick at Junior?” demanded Mrs. Moreland, thrusting a strong arm to sweep Mahlon back in order to clear a passage for her trip across the veranda and down the walk in the direction of her offspring.

By that time, Junior, encircled by his father’s arm, reached the steps. The ride in the cool evening air had refreshed him. Circulation was somewhat reËstablished in his bruised head. His senses were beginning to clear. The one thing he recognized was that any indignity shown Mr. Spellman would be instantly carried home and detailed to Mahala, and concerning Mahala his conscience was not clear. If he had dared, Mahlon Spellman would have leaned on Junior and wept tears of relief and joy, because Junior’s first words were the sweetest of music upon his anxious ears.

“Now, look here, you two old fuss-grannies,” the boy said half laughingly, “don’t make monkeys of yourselves, mollycoddling me. Somebody threw something at something and hit something, and I’m the something they happened to hit, and it happened in the street at the Spellman gate where Mahala and I were talking for a minute. Mr. Spellman doesn’t know a thing more about it than you do, or I do. It was mighty nice of Mrs. Spellman to bandage me up and of Mr. Spellman to bring me home. What you should do is to thank him politely for his kindness and will he come in and have a bracer from your best brand of port? I would be thankful for a little help to get up the stairway and to bed, because I really was hit a pretty solid jolt.”

Mahlon Spellman at that minute would have been happy to remove Junior’s shoes—what was that about latchets?—even to have cleaned them if cleaning were necessary. He promptly laid hold of Junior’s arm on the side nearest him and propelled him forward. What a wonderful boy he was! With only a few words to settle everything so quickly, so decently! The one place in which Providence had dealt unduly with Mahlon had been in denying him the consolation of a son. He felt at that moment that if he had been the father of a boy who could handle a difficult situation as easily as Junior had handled the present one, his delight would reasonably have known no bounds. Gladly he assisted in helping Junior up the stairs, in stretching him on the bed. Then the men left him to his mother and went downstairs to try the wine.

Port did one thing to Mahlon Spellman. It did quite another to Martin Moreland. It made Mahlon happy and discursive; it put wings on his mentality and set him sailing. It made Martin Moreland keen and analytical. It nailed him to one point and set him delving concerning its various ramifications. One good whiff of his best brand brought him straight back to the affair in hand. Why should his son and heir, the light of his eyes, and the pride of his heart, be hit upon his precious head with a brick? Who threw the brick? At what were they aiming when they threw it? If Mahala had been with Junior when the brick made its impact on his head, why had she not seen who did the throwing? He was not a lawyer, but he had met constant legal dealings in handling the diverse branches of his peculiar brand of banking business. He was very well informed concerning legal proceedings. Realizing this, Mahlon got himself from the Moreland home as speedily as possible, although the port was fine. Arriving once more at his own hay mow and feed trough, he called Jemima to hold the horse until he removed his shoes and best clothing. Jemima offered to care for the horse herself, and despite the fact that she had undergone many days of tiresome preparation for the party, Mahlon was the kind of man who would allow any one to do any personal service that was proffered on his behalf. So Mahlon entered his doorway to find Mahala had gone to bed, carrying the little gold bird to her room with her, while his wife was walking the floor in a torment of doubt and uncertainty.

She simply couldn’t understand; she said so repeatedly and emphatically. She said so until Mahlon’s sensitive nature could endure no more. He mounted the stairs and without preliminaries, opened the fourteen-year-old door of his daughter’s room. He found that young lady sitting dressed as she had been for the party, beside a small table with a hand on either side of the attractive cage containing the little bird.

Mahlon sat down and faced the situation squarely.

“Mahala, dear,” he said gently, “Mama and I are very much perturbed—very much, indeed! In the first place, neither of us approves of the expensive gift the Morelands saw fit to send for this supposedly happy occasion.”

“Nor do I,” said Mahala promptly. “Send it back. I don’t want it. I can see very nicely from the chandelier.”

“I wish,” said Mahlon, a slight petulance tincturing his voice, “that you would learn not to break in on me. Have you lived with me fourteen years and not yet learned how I detest being broken in on? The gift before you is quite as inappropriate and far from inexpensive.”

Mahlon saw the wave of stillness that swept over Mahala. He sensed the fact that every nerve and muscle in her was tightening.

“I cannot see that, Papa,” she said very deliberately. “Canaries are not expensive. Why isn’t a singing bird a delightful gift to give any one, especially a girl who loves music and colour as I do?”

Mahlon decided to dispense with subtleties and preliminaries. He brushed them aside. He leaned forward.

“Mahala,” he said, in the deepest bass that he could instill into his tones and his most authoritative manner, “where did that bird come from?”

Mahala blessed her stars that the question had not been: “Who gave you that bird?”

As it was, her alibi was perfect. She could look her father straightly in the eye and answer in her best adaptation of his tones and manner: “I have not the least idea. There are several women in town who raise birds for sale. If you think it is not beneath your dignity, you might make it your business to ask each of them to-morrow. Possibly they would tell you to whom they sold a bird to-day.”

That was precisely what Mahlon had intended doing, or having his wife do, but that clever provision “beneath your dignity” cut him to the core, even as his daughter intended that it should. She knew when she injected that neat little phrase that she had forever stopped her father and her mother from opening their mouths concerning the origin of the bird, because with each of them their dignity was more important than their souls—and more tangible in their own conception.

To Mahlon it was a body blow. He ran his perturbed fingers through his perplexed hair and stared at the innocent young face before him. Had he been any other man, he would have said that he would “be damned;” being himself, and a truthful man, he was absolutely confident that he should not be damned, while it certainly was “beneath his dignity” to lie on any subject. So he compromised by using milder methods.

“It passes my comprehension,” he said, and his bewilderment became tangible, shrouded him like a blanket.

Mahala instantly agreed with him.

“Yes, so it does mine,” she said. “Mother is very wise, perhaps she can think it out, or I may get some hint at school to-morrow. But, anyway, after all, Papa, is one small brass cage and one teeny yellow canary a matter of such very great moment? I don’t know what cages cost, but seems to me I’ve heard some one say that you could buy a nice singer for three dollars. I’ve even heard of them as cheap as two. Why is it such a terrible thing to be given a little bit of a gold bird with a miracle in its throat? Please go to bed, Papa, and don’t bother about it.”

Mahala arose and put her arms across her father’s shoulder, and her father drew her down in his lap and held her very close.

In his most warmly sympathetic tones of adjuration he said: “My child, this is only the beginning of the things Papa is forced to say to you to-night. I never have known you to lie to me. Your fact is impressively candid, I must admit. I must accept your word that you know nothing concerning the giver of this bird; but I have a very strong idea that you do know something concerning Junior’s injury which might have been, and yet may be, a thing extremely serious for all of us. There is such a thing as concussion of the brain developing hours after a blow on the head, you know.”

“I hardly think, Papa,” said Mahala, carefully settling Mahlon’s tie in his own best manner, “that a blow on the temple is going to produce concussion. It’s usually the back of the head, isn’t it, when there are bad results?”

Mahlon drew a breath of exasperation. He caught Mahala’s hands from his hair and his tie and shoving her to the extreme limit of his knees, forced her eyes to meet his or deliberately avoid them.

“Now, look here, young woman, let’s get down to brass tacks,” he said authoritatively. “Just what did Junior Moreland say or do to you at the gate?”

With perfect equanimity Mahala met the eyes of her stern parent, and realized that the time had arrived when she was past subterfuge, that she was facing a stern parent. She might as well get it over with because she really was both tired and sleepy, while she greatly desired a space of uninterrupted quiet in which she might think.

“He said that I was his ‘girl,’ and that when we finished school I was going to marry him. He was provoked about the bird. That’s what made him say it.”

“Has he ever said things like that to you before?” demanded Mahlon.

“He’s been saying that I was his girl ever since I can remember,” said Mahala; “but I’m not.”

“Oh, aren’t you?” asked Mahlon, and suddenly, to his daughter’s intense astonishment, he was playful, he was arch, there was a smile on his lips, a light in his eyes; and correspondingly, there was no smile on her lips and no trace of light in her eyes.

“Of course not, foolish!” she said immediately. “I am your girl, and Mother’s girl. How could I possibly be the girl of any boy in this town?”

“Um-m-m-m,” said Mahlon. “You will find, young lady, that you will be glad enough to be the girl of one of the boys of this town one of these days, when you have finished your education and the time comes to go to a home of your own. And I don’t know who there is that you know, or that you would be likely to know, that is so handsome or so admirably situated as Junior. Let me tell you, he did a mighty fine thing to-night, a manly thing, a praiseworthy thing.”

“Tell me,” said Mahala, delighted to have averted her father’s attention from the bird and herself.

And so, Mahlon told her how very praiseworthy had been Junior’s conduct in what she was constrained to admit had been a most embarrassing and difficult situation for her father.

“All right,” said Mahala, “that was fine of him. I do like him slightly better than I did before you told me that.”

“And now then, we will proceed,” said her father.

“What answer did you make when Junior said that you were his girl?”

“I told him I was not,” said Mahala promptly.

“And then what did Junior do?”

“He pulled me across the gate and tried to kiss me.”

“Ah!” said Mahlon Spellman. “Now we are getting at the meat of the matter. He tried to kiss you? And what did you do?”

“Pushed him away and wiped my face—what any one would do,” said Mahala.

“And then,” questioned Mahlon, “the brick?”

“Yes,” admitted Mahala, “the brick.”

“Now it happens,” said Mahlon, “that I picked up that piece of brick. Do you know where it came from?”

“I do not,” said Mahala.

“Well, I do,” said Mahlon. “It came from the border of one of your mother’s flower beds, just outside the parlour window. It was thrown from that direction. Some one who had not been invited to the party was watching it through the parlour window. Some one who doesn’t like Junior Moreland to think that you are his girl, threw the brick. Now, Mahala, women, even little girls of fourteen, are not sufficiently sophisticated to be in the first year of high school and at the same time so ignorant that they do not know which boy of their acquaintance is enough interested in them to risk taking the life of another boy who is guilty of no very great indiscretion.”

“That all depends on the boy,” said Mahala. “If he is the son of the rich banker, it’s ‘no great indiscretion;’ if it had been the son of—say the washerwoman, for example, right now you’d be out trying to kill him.”

“And I very probably should succeed in so far as I cared to go in such a premise,” said Mahlon promptly.

“That’s exactly what I thought,” said Mahala.

Slipping from his knee and walking to her dresser, she began very carefully unpinning the little wreath of silver-blue leaves that bound her hair.

“I am waiting,” said Mahlon with all the dignity of which he was capable—and he was capable of a high degree of really impressive dignity. No one can practise anything hourly for fifty years and not attain a high degree of excellence.

Mahala turned to her father, both hands still occupied with the wreath.

“Papa,” she said very quietly, “you just got through saying that I never told you a lie. Do you think it would be any great achievement on your part if you should force me to tell you one right now?”

“I am not asking for a lie!” thundered Mahlon. “I demand that you tell me the truth!”

“All right,” said Mahala, “I will. As you recall, when you stepped to the door my back was turned. You had a better chance to see any one who might have been in the shrubbery than I had. You have not the faintest notion who made the attack on Junior. Do you think it would be fair for me to answer your demand for the truth with merely a surmise on my part? I didn’t see who threw that piece of brick, so I positively refuse to make any surmise!”

Mahala turned again to the mirror and loosened one end of the silver wreath with something very closely resembling a jerk; while Mahlon, studying her back and her shoulders and the set of her yellow head, and catching a flash of the blazing eyes that the mirror reflected, suddenly remembered the advice that had been given him by his wife concerning the petticoat: “Don’t begin anything with Mahala that you can’t finish.”

He realized that he had undertaken something that he was not man enough to finish. Maybe there was a man in the world who could have laid rough hands upon Mahala and choked and beaten from her the information he wanted. Because of Mahlon’s inherent refinement he was not the man who, by any possibility, could do this. As gracefully as he ever passed down the church aisle on Sabbath morning with the contribution box, Mahlon arose, and walking over to the mirror, he put his arm around the small emanation of his own self-esteem.

“Very well, Mahala,” he said, “as always, Papa accepts your word. If you didn’t see who made this unjustifiable attack on Junior, of course, you cannot tell me who did it. I shall make it my business to find out for myself in some other way.”

“Thank you, Papa, that will be fine,” said Mahala, freeing the other end of the wreath. She opened her lips and looked at her father and then she closed them. What she had wanted to say was: “If there is a boy in this world who has the courage to throw a brick when Junior Moreland tries to kiss me, I am very much obliged to him!” But what she desired above everything else at that minute was to stop the discussion, to be left alone. Faintly in the distance, she now visioned a period, and so she stood carefully straightening the wreath, wordless and waiting.

Realizing something of this, Mahlon took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. He told her that he hoped she always would be a good girl, and if, at any time, anything worried her or she was in any way annoyed, she must come straight to Papa, who only wanted what was for her good and that she should grow up into such an exemplary and beautiful woman as her mother was.

The period came at last, so beautifully rounded and of such touching sentiment that Mahala emphasized it by putting her arms around her father’s neck, kissing him and thanking him, and giving him a slight propulsion in the direction of the door, through which he got himself without further speech. At last Mahala was left alone to the night and the bird.

Her first thought was to wonder if there could be anything really serious resulting from the blow which Junior had so richly deserved. She decided that on account of Junior’s youth and strength, he would speedily be all right. That burden eased from her mind, she went back to the window, and with her arms around the cage again, leaned her face against the wires and looked into the night of wonder and tried to think deep and straight.

This was difficult for it was a night of enchantment to the girl. The clouds floated across the moon and obscured it, then drifted away and left the night silvered in the high lights, deeply black in the shadows. Her heart ached over the lean face she had glimpsed through the window. Why should the best boy and the best scholar in her class be an outcast through no fault of his? Hers had been a lovely party from her mother’s viewpoint—weeks of preparation, pretty clothes, gifts, and adulation. Of course, the brick incident, annoying, but nothing of any moment—a beautiful party——

Mahala choked back an aching sob. She softly slipped her hand into the cage, picked the canary from his perch, and kissed his bright head before she went to bed in the early gray of morning. And even then, she was too restless, filled with pity, to sleep. She told herself repeatedly that she should have been anxious about Junior; but all the trouble in her heart arose from fear as to what might be happening to Jason.