"Selling the car!" wailed Lucy. "I think it is foolishness to do that. I'd like to know how you are to occupy Dan, the chauffeur, if we haven't a car to keep him busy."
"Oh, you incorrigible girls! Of course we will have to let the chauffeur go immediately; and I've got to tell the servants to-day that we can't keep them. I'll give them all a week's warning, of course."
"I understand all that," said Nan, "so please don't bunch me in with the incorrigibles."
"But, Douglas, Oscar has been with us since long before we were born. I don't see how you can have the heart to dismiss him," and Lucy looked resentfully at her older sister.
"Heart! I haven't the heart to let any of them go, but it would be a great deal more heartless to have them work for us with no money to pay them with."
"Now, Lucy Carter, you've pretty near made Douglas cry. You sound like a half-wit to me. Heartless, indeed! If you had half of Douglas's heart and one-fourth of her sense, you wouldn't make such remarks," and Nan put her arms around Douglas.
"No, she didn't make me cry, but what does make me feel bad is that Lucy and Helen can't even now realize the state of affairs. I hated to have to tell Helen she mustn't charge anything more, no matter what it is she wants."
"Charge! I should say not! I think I would walk on my uppers all the rest of my life before I'd put any more burden like that on Father," declared Nan.
"But don't people always charge when they haven't got any money? What will we do when we need things?" asked Lucy.
"Do without," said Douglas wearily. She saw it was going to take more than a few hours or a few days to make two of her sisters realize the necessity for reconstruction of their lives. "Helen and I are going right after breakfast to see real estate agents about getting us a tenant, and Helen is going to purchase some cotton stockings. She still persists in sticking to the letter of her oath not to wear silk stockings until Daddy is home and well."
"I'm going to wear cotton stockings, too, if Helen is."
"So you are, so are all of us, but we are going to keep on with the ones we have until we go to the country. Helen is spending her own money, some she had, on these stockings and no one is buying them for her," and Douglas went back to her room to dress and take up the burden of the day that was beginning to seem very heavy to her young shoulders. "If only Helen and Lucy could see without being knocked down and made to see," she thought. "Poor Father, if he had only not been so unselfish how much better it would have been for all of us now that we have got to face life!"