Helen said now, “We’ve got to run along, Aunt Mattie. We help about lunch. Father gets it ready, but we clear off and take Stephen out to play a while.” “Oh, that reminds me. How about Stephen? What does.... Is he.... How does your....” Her ingenuity was not enough to contrive a presentable form for her inquiry, but the child came to her rescue understandingly, “Why, Stephen seems to be growing out of those naughty streaks,” said Helen. “He’s lots better, somehow. He still has a tantrum once in a while, but not nearly so often, nor so bad. You see, he _likes_ Father’s being sick!” She knew how shocking this was on Stephen’s part, and added apologetically, “He’s so little, you know. He doesn’t understand how terrible it is for poor Father. And Father tells him stories. All the time, almost. Stephen loves them. Mother was always too busy to tell stories, you know.” “Well, I should say so indeed!” cried Aunt Mattie, outraged at the picture, even hypothetical, of poor Evangeline’s attempting to tell stories on top of everything else she had to do. “Step along with you, children,” she said now. “I hadn’t ought to have kept you so long, as ’tis. But I’ve been worrying my head off about you all. Tell your Poppa that I’m coming right over there this afternoon to see him just as soon as I get my trunk unpacked and things straightened around a little.” Chapter 13 “He that is down need fear no fall, He that is low, no pride,” said Lester Knapp aloud to himself. It was a great pleasure to him to be able to say the strong short Saxon words aloud. For years he had been shutting into the cage of silence all the winged beautiful words which came flying into his mind! And beautiful words which you do not pronounce aloud are like children always forced to “be quiet” and “sit still.” They droop and languish. But before this it would have been too foolish to repeat the lovely lines that came into his mind. What would Harvey Bronson have thought to hear “the army of unalterable law” pronounced in the office of Willing’s Emporium? Lester Knapp smiled to himself at the idea! And if it hadn’t been Harvey Bronson at hand it would have been some one else just as scandalized. But now there was no one to hear, no one but little Stephen playing with his toy train on the newspapers spread out over the floor. A blessed healing solitude lay about Lester as he sat in his wheel chair in the sunny kitchen peeling a panful of potatoes. It had been when he looked down at the gingham apron spread over his paralyzed knees that the song of the little shepherd had come to his mind. A gingham apron on a man! And peeling potatoes! He supposed that Harvey Bronson would die of shame if anybody put a gingham apron on him and expected him to peel potatoes. And yet there was nobody who talked louder than he about the sacred dignity of the home which ennobled all the work done for its sake--that was for _Mrs._ Harvey Bronson of course!