“Yes, my father thinks this thing is going to defeat you.” Helen sighed. “And, Carson, it's killing me to think that I am the prime cause of it. If I'd had a man's head I'd have known that your effort could accomplish nothing, and I'd have been like Mr. Garner and the others, and asked you not to mix up in it; but I couldn't help myself. Mam' Linda has your name on her lips with every breath. She thinks the sun rises and sets in you, and that you only have to give an order to have it obeyed.”
“That's the pity of it,” Carson said, with a sigh.
At this juncture there was the sound of a window-sash sliding upward, and old Dwight put out his head.
“Come on in!” he called out. “Your mother is awake and absolutely refuses to believe you haven't a dozen bullet-holes in you.”
“All right, father, I'm coming,” Carson said, and impulsively he held out his hand and clasped Helen's in a steady, sympathetic pressure.
“Now, you go to bed, little girl,” he said, more tenderly than he realized. In fact, it was a term he had used only once before, long before her brother's death. “Pardon me,” he pleaded; “I didn't know what I was saying. I--I was worried over seeing you look so tired, and--and I spoke without thinking.”
“You can say it whenever you wish, Carson,” she said. “As if I could get angry at you after--after--” But she did not finish, for with her hand still warmly clasping his fingers, she was listening to a distant sound. It was a restless human tread on a resounding floor.
“It's Mam' Linda,” Helen said. “She walks like that night and day. I must go to her and--tell her you are back, but oh, how _can_ I? Good-night, Carson. Ill never forget what you have done--never!”
FTER an almost sleepless night, spent for the greater part in despondent reflections over his failure in the things to which he had directed his hopes and energies, Carson rose about seven o'clock, went into his mother's room to ask how she had rested through the night, and then descended, to breakfast. It was eight o'clock when he arrived at the office. Garner was there in a cloud of dust, sweeping a pile of torn papers into the already filled fireplace.
“I'm going to touch a match to this the first rainy day--if I think of it,” he said. “It's liable to set the roof on fire when it's dry as it is now.”