"I'm not so sure of that. We might as well be sensible if we're going to talk about it." Amzi agreed to this with a nod and resettled himself in his chair. "Daddy isn't making enough to take care of us, that's all. This afternoon I was over in his office cleaning up his desk,--you know he never does it himself, and even a harum-scarum like me can help it some,--and I saw a lot of things that scared me. Bills and things like that. And it would be hard to talk to daddy about it; I don't think I ever could. And you know he really could make a lot of money if he wanted to; I can tell that from the letters he gets. He doesn't answer his letters. Every month last year I used to straighten his desk, and some of last spring's bills are still there, and they haven't been paid. I know, of course, that that can't go on forever." "You oughtn't to have to bother about that, Phil. It's none of your business." "Yes," she replied, earnestly, "it is my business. And it's been troubling me for a long time. I can't talk to father about it; you can see how that would be; and he's such a dear--so fine and kind. I suppose there isn't anybody on earth as fine as daddy. And he breaks my heart, sometimes; goes about so quiet, as though he had gone into himself and shut the blinds, as they do in a house where somebody's dead. It seems just like that, Uncle Amy." Amzi was uncomfortable. It was not to hear her speak of drawn blinds in houses of the dead that he had summoned Phil for this interview. His sisters had asked him to reason with her, as they had often appealed to him before in their well-meant but tactless efforts to correct her faults, but she had evinced an accession of reasonableness that made him uneasy. She had changed from the impulsive, exasperating young creature he knew into an anxious, depressed woman in a mackintosh, whom he did not know at all! He breathed hard for a few minutes, angry at his sisters for bringing this situation to pass. It was absurd to tame a girl of Phil's spirit. He had enjoyed, more than anything in his life, his confidential relations with Phil. It was more for the fun of the thing than because there was any cause for it that a certain amount of mystery was thrown about such interviews as this. There was no reason on earth why Phil shouldn't have entered by the front door in banking-hours, or visited him in her grandfather's house where he lived. But he liked the joke of it. He liked all their jokes, and entered zestfully into all manner of conspiracies with her, to the discomfiture of the aunts, to thwart their curbing of her liberties. He prided himself upon his complete self-control, and it was distinctly annoying to find that Phil's future, seen against a background plastered with her father's unpaid bills, caused a sudden hot anger to surge in his heart. Within the range of his ambitions and desires he did as he liked; and he had a hardened bachelor's fondness for having his way. He walked to the