The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1931-02-06

never, even in after years, told her
that. Only once, that she knew of,
had his spirit flashed up.
This had happened when her Uncle
William-he must have been her dead
mothers brother; he couldn't have
been her father's-had come to see
them, after the trial and before they
started east. She couldn't remember
ever having seen him before, but she
did remember the falsely genial smile
with which he had reproached her for
having forgotten him.
He'd been an ogre to her ever since.
Her father had not been afraid of
him. He'd sent her from the room on
Uncle Williams saying that her father
could probably guess what he'd come
to see him about. She'd obediently
gone, but only as far as her bedroom,
and the boom Of the ogre's voice had
come through the thin walls all too
clearly. He'd come to try to make
her father give her away, for ever, to
him. He'd spoken of her, terrifyingly,
as "the child! But her father, though
quiet and conciliatory at first, had
finally defied her uncle and told him
to go straight to HI!
She'd never heard him swear before
or since and she had thought that the
reason of his asking her, after her
uncle had gone, whether she had
heard any of their talk. Anyhow, it
had been why she told him she had
not.
She hadn't understood much of 1t
at the time, beyond her uncle's asser-
ton that her father had disgraced
himself and wasn't a fit person to
bring up child. She must, though,
have stored up good many uncom-
pretended phrases of that talk, or how
could she have been so sure, two or
three years later, when she read in
the newspaper of sensational prose-
cution of another professor under the
Mann act that this was the kind Of
trial her father had had.
Her father, Of course, hadn't been
sent to prison. He had "got off," But
why, if he hadn't done the horrible
thing, hadn't he gone back to the col
lege and she to school and Ann and
Alice and Amy come to play with her
again? Probably because people had
thought he'd done it, anyhow.
Their departure from the little uni
versity town out in California had felt
like running away to her and, she was
sure, to her father, also. There was
one incident about the journey which
she remembered very clearly. Her
fathers voice had tagged and she'd
looked up to see If he'd fallen asleep.
He wasn't asleep, but staring out over
the desert with such a look of pain in
his face that she burst into tears.
He'd comforted her very tenderly
and had said to her the only thing,
she thought, that he'd ever said in
direct reference to the catastrophe:
1--we got you," he told her, "and they
can't take you away from me. And
I'm going to see to it that you sha'n't
be the loser by this thing that's hap
pened to me. In the long run 1t may
be just as well for you that it did
happen"
At the time she'd had no idea what
he'd meant by that. But the events
of the later years Of his life made 1t
clear enough. He'd had scheme Of
some sort, now that he wasn't a col
lege professor any more, for making
her rich. A scheme that he'd never
brought off, to be sure, but one that
down to the very night of his death
he'd never lost hope about.
AS it had worked out, 1t was that
hope of his. always on the point Of
coming true, that had been the cause
of most of her unhappiness during the
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