"I know," answered Philip, checking his sobs and pressing the hand which Margaret put into his; "but oh, Greta, you don't know how I miss him." There was a little silence, and then Margaret said, anxiously,— "But, Philip, you won't oppose this plan, will you? Think what it is to see mother smile again!" "Not only will I not oppose it, but I will do all I can to help it on," answered Philip. "I have already thought of a plan whereby I can earn something in the long evenings that are coming, and to-morrow we will talk it over. It is time to go to bed now." "And you are not angry with me?" asked Margaret, penitently. "Oh no," said Philip, cheerfully. "Good-night!" Margaret crept away to her own little room with an uncomfortable feeling of humiliation and something like self-contempt at her heart. She had always been used to look down on Philip and think that she should have been the eldest son. Philip was always so quiet and cheerful. "He took things so easily," Margaret said; "nothing seemed to touch him." In the worst of their dark days, when he had been obliged to come home from Fulda where he had been studying with his uncle, and to give up the idea of going to college—when they had to sell their cows to meet the expenses of the mother's long illness, and when it became known that Fritz would always be an innocent—even then Philip could smile and play with the children, and when he had a little spare time could find pleasure in carving plants and leaves, in gathering crystals and flowers and watching the colours of the sunset. All these things Greta had set down in her own mind as marks of a frivolous, light-minded disposition. It was she who had to bear the burden of everything, as she said, and she shut her eyes to the fact that Philip quietly and silently took on himself all the more disagreeable parts of the work, both in the house and in the field; that it was Philip who amused Fritz by day and slept with him or oftener watched with him at night, who kept him out of mischief and taught him the few things he was capable of learning. She had shut her eyes to all these things, as I said, but now they seemed to be suddenly opened. She remembered with a pang of remorse the hundreds of times she had spoken sharply to the poor innocent, how many times she had thrown his stores of pebbles and acorns out of the window and knocked down his block houses, and then she remembered, that last day, how Fritz had begged to go and see the new calf and she had refused to take him because she was engaged in putting the last stitches to a new hood. "Philip would have laid down his best piece of carving to please the child," she thought. And then a cold, sick shudder came over her. If she had gone with Fritz in the daytime, perhaps he would not have stolen out at night, and he might have been here now. Philip had known of her refusal, and yet he had never spoken one word of reproach.