"I hope he'll have to live on hygienic wheat biscuits when he gets home," I responded. "I hope his wife has learned to cook them in two hundred ways, and whether they're mashed, stewed, fried, pied, creamed, puddinged or jellied, he'll have disappointment three times a day of finding that they are still the same old wheat biscuits. That'll be punishment enough for him, but it won't make Peter believe I didn't do this, and by this time he must have got Roper's letter cancelling the agreement." "I suppose we'll have to give up the place in the end," said Marion, with a sigh. "Don't let Paul hear," I said in a low tone, "or he'll make the dickens of a row." At that moment Paul was leaning over the edge dangling a long string into the well; fishing, I supposed, in my ignorance. For days he had been going about with a dreamy look on his face that betokened a secret play of absorbing interest. I drew a breath of relief when I saw that he didn't look up at Marion's unguarded remark. All would have been well had I not been so misguided as to make a suggestion that aroused Marion's sense of duty and her persistent belief that I tried to shirk mine. "Paul," said she, and even in that one word I detected the compassionate severity suitable to the extraction of a tooth--"do you know that we'll have to leave----" "Marion," I implored, "wait till we get him into the house--he'll rouse the neighborhood." I should have known better than to protest. Once started in the track of duty nothing short of a disastrous collision would stop her. She did pause, but merely to make a remark to me that led to a sharp altercation. We forgot our rule never to give way to our angry passions before Paul; indeed, he was so unusually silent that we didn't remember his presence until we were suddenly struck dumb by a shrill exclamation of impatient wrath that arose from the other side of the well. "Dar-r-n it!" he ejaculated, with petrifying distinctness. If he had turned into a quick-firing gun and dropped a shell at our feet the effect could not have been more paralyzing. Our boy had been carefully screened, not only from evil, but from vulgarity; he had never gone to Sunday school, nor been left to the care of a nursemaid. His companions were his toys and domestic pets; other children he had seen only from a distance, and he regarded them as curious, but not interesting, little animals. His face reflected the purity of his mind. I hesitate to say so, for obvious reasons, but his face at the age of seven was simply angelic; I mean, of course, normally, not when his mouth was wide open in the act of expressing bodily or mental anguish. And this is not merely his mother's opinion and mine; it is Aunt Sophy's also. Indeed, Aunt Sophy, who is never tired of drawing attention to his remarkable resemblance to a photograph of me as a boy, has gone much farther, and has given utterance to thoughts that we only think.