She was not ready with peremptory refusal, as she had been on the other occasion; she had met the bugbear of Rickety Dick and had prevailed over the old man's suspicions. As Latisan averred, her presence might help matters; she would entertain strange and acute regrets if her absence should allow the split that Latisan seemed to apprehend. He timidly put his hand on her arm. "Please!" "I'll be intruding on a business talk. I may make him all the more touchy." She was hesitating, weighing the hazards of each plan--to go or to stay away. "There's no private business to be talked. I'm simply going to tell him that I have blown the ice and have the logs in the river and I want to have his orders about how many splash dams I can blow up if I need to do it for a head o' water to beat the Three C's drive to Skulltree. Really, he needs to talk with somebody who is gentle," he went on, and she responded to the touch on her arm and walked slowly with him up the hill. "He sits there day by day and reads the tooth-for-tooth part of the Old Testament, and it keeps hardening his heart. I've thought of a plan. Suppose you get friendly with him! You can take some soothing books up to him in your off hours and read aloud. Let's try to make a different man of Eck Flagg, you and I." So, over the ledges where her childish feet had stumbled, Lida Kennard, trembling, anxious, yearning for her kin, went again to the door of the big mansion on the hill. Latisan's words had opened a vista of hope to her; she might be able, after all, to render the service to which old Dick had exhorted her, hiding her identity behind a woman's desire to cheer an invalid. It was the same square, bleak house of her early memories, now dark except for a dim glow through two dingy windows in the lower part; the yee-yawed curtains were eloquent evidence of the housekeeping methods. "He won't have any women around, as I told you." Latisan was not tactful in his excuse for the slack aspect of the house. "I'm afraid it isn't best for me to go in," she said, making a final stand. "If you go with me you're all right," declared the drive boss, with pride of power where the Flagg interests were concerned. "It'll do him good to be jumped out of himself--to see a young lady from the city." Latisan did not knock; he walked in, escorting the girl. In the middle of the sitting room, in a wheel chair that was draped with a moosehide tanned with the hair on it, she beheld an old man with a fleece of white mane and beard. A shaded oil lamp shed a circle of radiance on a big book which lay on his knees. The girl noted that the book was the Bible. Outside that circle of radiance the room was in darkness and the old man heard footsteps without being able to see who had entered; in the shadows was old Dick on his stool. "That you, Latisan?" demanded the master.