In the morning she rather expected to see O'Hara, but a month passed before she met him one evening in October, when she came home late from work. The autumn rains had come and gone, destroying the fugitive bloom of Miss Polly's flower-beds, and scattering the leaves of the elm tree in a moist, delicately tinted carpet over the grass. An hour ago the sun had set in a purple cloud, and beneath the electric lights, which shone through the fog with a wan and spectral glimmer, the dark outlines of the city assumed an ominous vagueness. There was no light in the house; and the deserted yard, silvered from frost and strewn with dead leaves, which lay in wind-drifts along the flagged walk, had the haunted aspect of a place where youth and happiness have passed so recently that the fragrance of them still lingers. "Archibald went off to school without telling you good-bye," she said in a friendly voice. "He was much disappointed." Stopping in the walk, he looked at her with unaffected surprise. "Why, I thought that was what you wanted!" She met this quite honestly. "Not after I talked to you." "What in thunder did I say to change your opinion of me?" The strong west wind blowing around him and lifting the roughened red hair from his forehead, appeared to lessen by contrast the breezy animation of his manner. "It wasn't anything you said," she answered simply. "I found out you were different from what I thought, that is all." "Then you must have thought something!" he laughed aloud. "I was afraid at first that you might have a bad influence over Archibald." "Oh, the kid!" His mirth was as irrepressible as his energy. "You see I have to be very careful," she went on gently. "I want to do my best by him." At this he turned on her with sudden earnestness. "You can't do your best by being too careful--take my word for it. If you want him to be a man, don't begin by making a mollycoddle of him. Let him rough it a bit, or it will be twice as hard for him when he grows up." "But I do--I do. I am sending him away from me. Isn't that right?" "You bet it is. Let him learn his own strength. I've lived among men ever since I was born, and I tell you, nine times out of ten, the boy who is tied to his mother's apron-strings, loses his grip when he is turned out into the world. At the first knock-down he goes under." Instinctively she flinched. If only he wouldn't! "After he leaves school of course he will go to the university," she said. "That's right," he agreed emphatically, and pursued a little wistfully: "Now, that's what I was cheated out of, and there've been times when I'd have given my right arm to have been through college instead of having to keep my mouth shut and then run home and look up the meaning of things in an encyclopædia. It's a handicap, not knowing things. Nobody who hasn't had to get along in spite of, it knows what a darned handicap it is!" "But you read, don't you?"