It was when I was fourteen, and about to enter the mill, that mother was taken sick. I had never known mother to be sick, and it was hard to understand the silent house and the darkened room. Mrs. Lane came over and took charge, and Marjorie stayed at home from school to help. One day as I came up the path Marjorie met me with, "Mother wants you," so I went into the room. Father was there; it seems he had not gone to the mill that afternoon. He was sitting on a chair with his elbows resting on his knees and his cheeks between his hands, and a stray beam of light from the afternoon sun fell through the window and across his forehead. I wondered that I had never noticed before how old he was. "Is that you, Laddie?" my mother called in a thin, weak voice, and I came beside the bed. "My boy, my boy!" she said, and her face worked strangely, but she could say nothing more than just "My boy." Then I knelt beside her, not knowing what else to do, and she put one of her thin hands in my hair, and ran her fingers slowly, with a strange sort of caressing, up and down and about my head. And then an odd thing happened. She began to sing, in a strange, high, tremulous key, "The Lord is my Shepherd." She did not sing it as you have heard it in church, but with a gentle, rhythmic beat, like a lullaby, just as she had sung it to me many a time when I was a little child. After a while she seemed to fall asleep, and I slipped out again. Father had never moved, but beads of sweat were standing on his forehead. Marjorie met me, round-eyed and pale, at the door. "Oh, Frank! Is mother going--is mother going--to die?" The last words were breathed rather than spoken. "I don't know," I said, pushing by her and gulping at something in my throat. . . . After mother's death Marjorie had to stay at home from school and take charge of the house. Marjorie had a vast native ability behind her deep black eyes, and in a short time matters were running as smoothly as could be hoped. I took a job in the mill--my dream of being a locomotive engineer had vanished almost with my baby teeth--and I was now working from seven in the morning until six at night for a consideration of three dollars a week. My father earned ten dollars a week, so we were in easy circumstances. There were no picture shows to tempt our spare quarters, nor automobiles to make us envious of our more fortunate neighbours. Jack Lane also took a job in the mill, when I did. We graduated into long trousers together, and made our youthful excursions, arm in arm, into the town on Saturday nights. Jack was a handsome boy, with the fair skin and hair of his sister Jean, and many a coquettish eye was turned on him as we strolled about the little town, or even as he worked at his post in the mill. But while Jack was by no means above a mild flirtation, he used to dismiss such events with the comprehensive remark, "They're not in the class of Marjorie--or Jean."