Then, suddenly, furiously, Alvin was flung aside, back against the sharp point of the squire's desk. Young women do not keep house in the Pennsylvania German fashion, with sweeping and scrubbing and beating of carpets, without developing considerable muscular power. Terrified, bruised by contact with the sharp corner of the desk, Alvin lifted hands to defend himself from Katy, whose worth he had learned so suddenly to value. Katy, however, stayed to punish him no further. Instead, she rushed across the room and threw herself into the arms of the squire. She spoke shrilly, she sobbed and cried. "Send him away and let me talk to you alone! I must talk to you! Oh, please send him away!" Alvin needed no orders. He read in the squire's expression permission to depart, and he slipped sidewise out the door, making himself as small as possible for the passage. When the door had closed behind him, the squire put Katy into a corner of the sofa in his back office and sat down beside her. "Now, Katy, begin." With tears and hysterical laughter, Katy began her story. "I thought I was so fine and powerful when I helped him. I thought I was rich with my two hundred dollars and that I could do anything. I thought he had no chance and I would help him. I pitied him because he had a bad name from his father. The worst thing was I liked him. Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" The squire's frown grew blacker and blacker. "He took the money and never paid any of it back, and then stole this from you yet! Money you were saving to pay me! Money you had borrowed for him! Oh, Katy, Katy!" Then, suddenly, the squire laughed. "Katy, dear, I bought a gold brick like this once. It wasn't just like this, but it cost me much more. We've got to learn, all of us! Oh, you poor soul! And my gold brick was not bought for the sake of charity, Katy!" The squire laughed and laughed and Katy cried and cried as her head rested upon the broad shoulder which had been offered to her earlier. "Now, Katy, it is late and I will take you home." The squire put Katy's scarlet shawl about her and took her by the arm, and together they went up the misty street. At the Hartmans' gate the squire left his companion. Then, with a quicker stride he sought the house of Alvin Koehler. CHAPTER XVII ALVIN DOES PENANCE AND IS SHRIVEN THE squire stayed for fifteen minutes with Alvin Koehler; when he left, Alvin was limp; he sat in his little house and wept. Hitherto in his life Alvin had had grave difficulties; he had been unhappy in his poverty; he had been embarrassed by the queerness of his father; he had been disturbed when he feared that Katy Gaumer would not keep her promise and help him go to school; he had been terrified by the behavior of the Millerstown children and by the overshadowing cloud of his unpaid bills.