So what with the poetry, and the melancholy brought on by the thought of Elsie going back to have that old bristly weasel-faced Mustard breathe down her neck when she was doing sums, I brought myself to a pretty low ebb. Elsie was sorry for me, I think, but said nothing. She had aches of her own under the old blue serge blouse (left side front) when Harriet Caw went past her on our stairs rustling in silk underthings and an impudent little nose in the air as if she smelt a drain. At any rate I spent a good deal of time in the woods that summer. Woods are most sympathetic places when you are young and just desperately sad, but can't for the life of you tell why. Doctors, I believe, know. But when mother asked old Doc McPhail, he only grinned and said she had better "let the kail-pot simmer a while longer. The broth would be none the worse!" But my mother could make nothing out of that, nor I either for that matter. Yet through the glass of the office door I actually saw the doctor grin at my father, and my father--yes, he actually winked back! Old brutes, both of them--fifth commandment or no fifth commandment! "No books--no office!" said old McPhail, "not for a while. Let the colt run till he tires!" So the colt was, as it were, turned out to grass. The official explanation was that between nineteen and twenty there occurred a dangerous period--twenty-one was a yet more dangerous age. _And I had overgrown my strength!_ I liked that--_I_ who could vault the counter twenty-five times back and forth, leaning only on the fingers of one hand! Something during the long summer days drew me persistently to the Deep Moat Woods. Some magnet of danger past and gone for ever--something, too, of nearness to the little schoolhouse, to which, spite of my father and myself, Elsie had carried her point and returned. I was sulky and jealous about this--much to Elsie's indignation. "Mr. Mustard--Mr. Mustard!" she said, with her eyes cold and contemptuous; "I can keep Mr. Mustard in his place--ay, or ten of him--you too, Joseph Yarrow, mopping about the woods like a sick cat! You are not half the man your father is!" And, indeed, I never set myself up to be. The day I am telling about was a Saturday. Elsie was to have gone for a walk with me; I expected it. But, instead, she informed me in the morning, when I met her setting out to go to the school-house for an extra lesson, that she had arranged to spend the afternoon with father in his office, going into her grandfather's affairs. "Mr. Yarrow," she said, "thinks that everything which my grandfather possessed _before_ he began to kill people is quite rightly mine. He had weaved hard for that. It would have been my mother's, and it ought to be mine, too. Even a bad man, your father says, ought to be allowed to do a little good after he is dead, if it can be arranged honestly. That is what your father says." "My father!" I repeated after her bitterly, "it is always my father now."