"When you were just a little tot," said Levine at last, "you were full of gumption and did your own thinking. And I've been glad to see you keep the habit. Always make your own decisions, dear. Don't let me or any one else decide matters of conscience for you. 'To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.' Eh, little girl?" He rose as he heard Amos coming in the back door, and with his hand under Lydia's chin, he looked long and earnestly into her eyes. Then as Billy had done earlier in the evening, he sighed, "Oh, Lydia! Lydia!" and turned away. CHAPTER XV THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS "Nothing is so proud or so brave as the young pine when it first tops the rest of the forest."--_The Murmuring Pine_. For several days Lydia was unhappy and absent-minded. At first, in her thoughts she was inclined to blame Billy for forcing this turmoil of mind on her. But, a little later, she admitted to herself that for years, something within her had been demanding that she take a stand on the Indian question something to which Charlie Jackson and Billy had appealed, something which Kent and John Levine had ignored. Yet neither Charlie nor Billy had really forced her to a decision. Lydia was grown up. All her young life she had carried the responsibilities and had faced the home tragedies that come usually only to grown folk. Now, in her young womanhood it was natural and inevitable that she should turn to the larger responsibilities of the living world about her in order to satisfy the larger needs of her maturity. Yet, still old affection fought with new clarity of vision. Old loyalty quarreled with new understanding. Bit by bit she went over her thinking life, beginning with her first recollection of Charlie Jackson in the class in Civil Government, and all that was feminine and blind devotion in her fought desperately with all that education and her civic-minded forefathers had given her.