"But you'll let me help you," entreated the girl, bringing the chair nearer to the side of the bed. "Go away," repeated the old man. "I can't go away and leave you in this condition," pleaded Miss Billy, bent on restitution. Mr. Schultzsky tried to raise himself from the pillow, but fell back with a groan. He regarded her vindictively, and his face was more sinister than ever as he repeated savagely--"Go away! Go away!" Miss Billy set down the tray on the chair and withdrew quickly. The burning tears filled her eyes as she felt her way along to the gate. "He was cruel," she said bitterly to herself. "I didn't deserve it." A calmer mood took possession of her before she reached the door of her home. "Well, he didn't strike me," she said stoutly. "And I know I did my duty. But I shan't try to make friends with him again, and I shall never never let Ted hear of this." But her brother's quick wits had already anticipated and made ready for her home coming. As she flung off her hat, and threw herself into the big chair in the study, the sermon board thrust a black and white message before her eyes. It had been empty when she left the house. Now it bore a rude sketch of a nondescript animal, a cross between a bear and a wolf, arrayed in a huge night cap. An unmistakable Little Red Riding Hood stood at the side of the beast. And below was scrawled in Theodore's hand: Some bears have got two legs, And some have got more; Be lessons right severe, If they've two legs or four! CHAPTER XIII HARD LINES "Though losses, and crosses, Be lessons right severe--, There's wit there, ye'll get there, Ye'll find nae other where." "BROWN'S sodas are the best in town, if they do come high,--and the girls know it," Miss Billy had jeered a few weeks before. Theodore repeated the words now with a wholly sober grimace, as he scrambled into his clothes at half past six of an early July morning. Vacation had brought him a permanent position in the drug store, at four dollars a week, but the skeleton still walked. It was not a very hideous skeleton, to be sure,--just a half dozen or so of remarkably round and robust young misses,--but it had a prodigious appetite for the confection known as ice-cream soda, and it never happened to have any money of its own. Theodore, red in the face from the growing heat and his hurried exertions, frowningly continued his unpleasant reflections. "There are two or three of those girls that have treated me contemptibly of late,--probably because I no longer live in a fourteen-room house. That Myrtle Blanchard is a notable example. She scarcely takes the trouble to see me on the street, but she manages to get around to the soda fountain every day, either alone, or with the crowd of girls." He was lacing his shoes now, and another side of the subject presented itself.