Received of Mrs. Ben Becker, forty-five dollars for one month's board for three. "Aw," said the conductor, thrusting it back at her, "ask your mamma to tell her troubles to a policeman, little girl." From that day Lilly rebelled. "Guess I can find my way to school without having to carry a note like a baby." "But, Lilly, you might get mixed up." "Nit." "Don't sass me that way or I'll tell your father when he comes home to-night." A never quite bursting cloud which hung over the entire of Lilly's girlhood was this ever-impending threat which even in its rare execution brought forth no more than a mild and rather sad rebuke from a mild and rather sad father, and yet which was certain to quell any rising rebellion. "I notice you never get sassy or ugly to your father, Lilly. I do all the stinting and make all the sacrifices and your father gets all the respect." "Mamma, how can you say that!" "Because it's a fact. To him it is always, 'Yes, sir, no, sir.' I'm going to tell him a few things when he comes home to-night of what I go through with all day in his absence. Elocution lessons! Just you ask him for them yourself." "Oh, mamma, you promised!" "Well, I will, but I oughtn't." Every evening until long after Lilly's dresses had descended to her shoe tops and until the ritual came to have a distinctly ridiculous aspect, there took place the one pleasantry in which Lilly and her father ever indulged. About fifteen minutes before seven, three staccato rings would come at the front-door bell. At her sewing or what not, Mrs. Becker would glance up with birdlike quickness. "That's papa!" And Lilly, almost invariably curled over a book, would jump up and take stand tensely against the wall so that when the room door opened it would swing back, concealing her. In the frame of that open doorway Mrs. Becker and her husband would kiss, the unexcited matrimonial peck of the taken-for-granted which is as sane to the taste as egg, and as flat, and then the night-in-and-night-out question that for Lilly, rigid there behind the door, never failed to thrill through her in little darts. "Where is Lilly, Carrie?" MRS. BECKER (assuming an immediate mask of vacuity): "Why, I don't know, Ben. She was here a minute ago." "Well, well, well!" looking under the bed, under the little cot drawn across its baseboard and into a V of a back space created by a catacorner bureau. "Well, well, well! What could have happened to her?" At this juncture Lilly, fairly titillating, would burst out and before his carefully averted glance fling wide her arms in self-revelation. "Here I am, papa!" "Well, I'll declare, so she is!" lifting her by the armpits for a kiss. "Well, well, well!" "Papa, I got ninety in arithmetic. I'd have got a hundred, but I got the wrong common denominator." "That's right, Lilly. Keep up well in your studies. Remember, knowledge is power." "Get your father's velveteen coat, Lilly." "Papa, Ella McBride kisses boys."