It was, therefore, a wordlessly understood thing between the doctor and his daughter during the remainder of his life, but he became vocal about it on his profane and painful deathbed. He was hotly and bitterly rebellious at being obliged to die at forty-eight. His heedless habits of finance would leave her pitifully poor: beyond the dull house on the dull street, midway between The Hill and the mills, there would be something under two thousand dollars. Glen would have to leave high school in her final year and go to business college, and to work. Glenwood Darrow had always told himself that presently he would turn over a new leaf, force collections, invoke the law on long outstanding accounts, set his affairs in order and assure the girl’s future.... The automobile accident put a sudden and gory period to his plans. He had been persuaded, after long delay, to give up his elderly horse and his battered buggy and buy a machine, and--once he had been actually won over--the salesman and demonstrator found him juvenilely enthusiastic and a quick if careless and cocksure pupil. The demonstrator found that his store of bright and steady patience would not be heeded in this case: the doctor said--“Yes, yes! I get you! All right! All _right_, I say--Good God, man, do I look like a half-wit?”--at the end of the second lesson and refused a third. He came back from his third attempt with broken bumper and bent fenders, and a chuckling delight in his achievement, though he absolutely refused to take Glen with him until he’d “got the hang of the fool thing in a little better,” and from his fourth trip he was brought home in the ambulance he had summoned so many times for others, and cursed for its tardiness and its meager comforts. He lived for ten difficult days with the grief-stricken girl and a brow-beaten nurse in attendance, with Luke Manders coming in at night to lift him capably when his position became unbearable, and Miss Ada Tenafee calling conscientiously to inquire every afternoon on her way home from school. Remorsefully, he laid before his daughter the nakedness of their land. “But it doesn’t matter, Dad, dear,” she comforted him. “I always expected to work; you know I did. It doesn’t matter; nothing matters but _you_!” Her voice broke on the words but she did not cry. She bore herself, from the moment that he was carried into the house, crushed and broken, until he was carried out of it for the last time, with the same composure she had exhibited on the night of Luke Mander’s exodus from his mountains. She was, after all, the man told himself with satisfaction and pride, his child; the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie had been merely the mild receptacle for her embryonic stage; directly she was born, she was triumphantly _his_, and his child would make her way in the world against any mischance.