"I Wonder," said Andrew F. Biron, manager of the White Star Mine, to his sister, as he watched, with drawn brows, André François, immaculate in a white flannel suit, bare-kneed and sailor-hatted, go down the street attended by the ministering Angélique, "what Providence had against me when it picked me for the father of Andrew François?" "He is certainly the strangest child I have ever known," answered his sister irrelevantly, "and I have had experience with a good many--an old maid always does, you know." "What he needs is to mix up with the other boys--to become Americanized. There is too much European varnish on him. It needs to be rubbed off so that the real boy underneath will show through." "He needs something," assented his sister shortly, for she had looked with none too gracious an eye upon the advent of André François and his _bonne_, the volatile Angélique. "He thinks of nothing except how he is dressed--a miniature fop! He is now ten years old and he is absolutely helpless. He seems never to have learned to do anything for himself. There is no manliness nor independence in him--nothing but a head full of foolish, old-world notions about what is due a gentleman of his standing. As for Angélique, one moment she runs his errands and the next bullies him. Who ever heard of a big boy of ten with a nurse, anyway?" Miss Biron stopped a moment to catch her breath, then continued: "To be frank with you, Andrew, I think you have been little less than criminal to take so little interest in him as to leave him for eight years in an environment of which you knew nothing. You should have had him home immediately after your wife's death, and not have waited until his grandmother died and the responsibility of your son was literally forced upon you." "The responsibility of his son." All through a busy morning at the office the phrase remained subconsciously in Mr. Biron's mind. At noon hour, when the work slackened up, he set himself to face and thresh it out, for it was his policy to face and thresh out at the first opportunity any difficulty which confronted him. For half an hour he paced his office, his hands thrust hard down into his pockets, in his mouth a black, unlighted cigar of the stogie species, upon which he chewed with all the concentrated violence which he would have liked to expend upon the problem in hand. His son--how well he remembered the little two-year-old codger, with his serious blue eyes and his fleece of yellow hair, whom he had taken tight in his arms and told not to forget his daddy, as he bid goodby on the steamer to his pretty, pale French wife going back on a visit to her native land.