"I love my work. Besides, you will live your own life, and so you must grow up and love someone and marry her. I can't depend on any one but myself," she added, a little bitterly. Luke stared into the fire. Perhaps this tousle-haired, freckle-faced boy surmised his sister's love-story. If so no one--least of all his sister--should ever hear of the facts from his lips. "I'm never going to get married. I want to make a lot of money like Mr. O'Valley did--quick. Then we'll go and live in Europe and maybe I'll get a steam yacht and we'll hunt for buried treasure," he could not refrain from adding. "All right, dear. Just work hard for now and be my pal; we'll let the future take care of itself. Another thing--we want to have as merry a Christmas as if mother were with us. It's the only thing to do or else we'll find ourselves morbid and unable to keep going." Shamed tears were stoically refused entrance into Luke's blue eyes. "I guess I'll buy you a silver-backed comb and brush. I got some extra money." "Oh, Luke--dear!" Mary made the fatal error of trying to hug him. He wriggled away. "Trudy never came near us," he said, sternly. Mary was silent. "But Mr. O'Valley came like a regular----" "Don't you think you ought to get to bed?" Mary changed the subject. "Sleep in the room next to mine if you like." "When are you coming upstairs?" "Soon. I want to look over the letters." Luke rose and pretended a nonchalant stretching. "Are you going to the office right away?" "Not until New Year's." Something in the tired way she spoke evoked Luke's pity and sent him away to smother his boy-man's grief by promises of a glorious future in which his sister should live in the lap of luxury. With its customary shock death had for the time being given Mary a false estimate of her mother and herself, the usual neurasthenic experience people undergo at such a time. It seemed, as she sat alone by the fire, that she must have been a strangely selfish and ungrateful child who misunderstood, neglected, and underestimated her mother, and she would be forced to live with reproachful memories the rest of her days. Each difference of opinion--and there had been little else--which had risen between them was magnified into brutal injustice on Mary's part and righteous indignation on her mother's. This state of mind would find a proper readjustment in time but that did not comfort Mary at the present moment. Her mother was dead, and when a mother is gone so is the home unless someone bravely slips into the absent one's place without delay and assumes its responsibilities and credits. For Luke's sake this was what Mary had resolved to do.