"Why, send her to an asylum, of course. That's where she ought to have been all these years." Mr. Opp, sitting upon the small of his back, with one leg wrapped casually about the leg of the chair, stared at him for a moment in consternation, then, gathering himself together, rose and for the first time since we have met him seemed completely to fill his checked ready-made suit. "Send Kippy to a lunatic asylum!" he said in tones so indignant that they made his chin tremble. "You will do nothing whatever of the kind! Why, all she's ever had in the world was her pa and Aunt Tish and her home; now he's gone, you ain't wanting to take the others away from her too, are you?" "Well, who is going to take care of her?" demanded Ben angrily. "I am," announced D. Webster, striking as fine an attitude as ever his illustrious predecessor struck; "you take the money that's in the bank, and leave me the house and Kippy. That'll be her share and mine. I can take care of her; I don't ask favors of nobody. Suppose I do lose my job; I'll get me another. There's a dozen ways I can make a living. There ain't a man in the State that's got more resources than me. I got plans laid now that'll revolutionize--" "Yes," said Ben, quietly, "you always could do great things." D. Webster's egotism, inflated to the utmost, burst at this prick, and he suddenly collapsed. Dropping limply into the chair by the table, he held his hand over his mouth to hide his agitation. "There's--there's one thing," he began, swallowing violently, and winking after each word, "that I--I can't do--and that's to leave a--sister--to die--among strangers." And then, to his mortification, his head went unexpectedly down upon his arms, and a flood of tears bedimmed the radiance of his twenty-five-cent four-in-hand. From far down the river came the whistle of the boat, and, in the room below, Jimmy Fallows removed a reluctant ear from the stove-pipe hole. "Melindy," he said confidentially, entirely forgetting the late frost, "I never see anybody in the world that stood as good a show of gittin' the fool prize as that there D. Opp." IV The old Opp House stood high on the river-bank and gazed lonesomely out into the summer night. It was a shabby, down-at-heel, dejected-looking place, with one side showing faint lights, above and below, but the other side so nailed up and empty and useless that it gave the place the appearance of being paralyzed down one side and of having scarcely enough vitality left to sustain life in the other. To make matters worse, an old hound howled dismally on the door-step, only stopping occasionally to paw at the iron latch and to whimper for the master whose unsteady footsteps he had followed for thirteen years.