“Angry? No!” Mr. Shelby vociferated. “What in continental did _he_ have to be angry about? _I_ was the one that was angry. He stood up there and laughed and bragged about what he was goin’ to do till you’d thought he’d bust with the gas of it! Why, Great Geemunently!—you’d thought this whole city’s got nothin’ to do but turn in and run around doin’ what Ornaby Addition says it’s got to! I says, ‘Yes!’ I says. ‘So from now on the tail’s goin’ to wag the dog, is it?’ ‘I don’t know but it might,’ he says. ‘This town’s done considerable laughin’ at me,’ he says. ‘I expect it’s about time I did some laughin’ myself,’ he says. ‘You’ll have to look out for your charter, Mr. Shelby,’ he says.” Martha ventured to continue her naïveté, and unfortunately carried it too far. “And _will_ you have to look out for it, papa?” she asked gently. With his thin but hard old fist he struck the table a blow that jarred the china and jingled the silver. “Haven’t you got any _sense_?” he shouted. “I’ll show him who he’s talkin’ to! There’s a _few_ men left in this town that’ll teach him a little before he gets through with ’em! I’m not the only one he thinks he can lay down the law to.” He glared at her, his small gray face flushing with his increased anger. “Are _you_ still standin’ up for him after the way he’s treated you?” This took Martha’s breath, and for an instant she was at a loss. Never before had her father seemed to notice how she was “treated”—by anybody. “I don’t know what you—I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Don’t you?” he returned sharply, and, before the bright stare of his angry eyes, her own troubled gaze fell. “You say you don’t know what I mean?” “Why—no. Not—not at all,” she murmured. “Well, _I_ do!” And with a brief shot of breath between his almost closed lips, he further expressed an emotion that remained enigmatic to her. He rose. “Seems to me it’s about time you quit standin’ up for him,” he said; and stalked out of the room, leaving her still at the table. She sat there in an attitude of some rigidity after she had heard him go upstairs, and she continued to sit there, though she had finished her dinner before he departed. The conclusion she reached in her thoughts was that there was a question she would never ask him;—she would never ask him what he had meant by that final remark of his. She hoped he meant only that her pride ought to resent a neighbour’s failure to come to say he was glad to see her at home again—but she feared her father meant more than this. She feared he meant much more, and she so feared it that she would never dare to ask him.