"Of course not." Mrs. Gerould looked at her understandingly; the tall, graceful woman went softly over to the little bed and turned the night-light to see her daughter's sleeping face. The little bobbed head was deep in the pillows. Minga opened her eyes slightly and drowsily closed them. "Sard," she spoke with the curious distinctness of a person speaking under a drug, "I thought the Mede and the Persian were here--they are so dear--if they were here, you know"--Minga spoke drowsily, "Dunstan would get all right and Terry would come alive, the Mede and the Persian would fix it. They--they are hummers." The man and the woman looked long and lovingly at her; then they looked at each other, shaking their heads, the little figure on the bed was so dear to them, yet they, absorbed in their love for each other, seemed to have so little power, so little direction over her. This was their only child; she had had all the care and love they could lavish on her, yet she seemed as remote as an alien to all they believed and felt. They, the Mede and Persian, were deliberate, slow-thinking people of the agricultural age; Minga, the one child of their union, was the strange electric vivacious spirit of a machine age. It was this simple fact that the couple hardly realized that made it impossible for them to train their little daughter in the way they thought she should go. Minga must train herself in the way she would go. Somehow, they believed, she would train herself right. Sard, at last, remembered her duties as daughter of the house. "Your room is all ready," she whispered; "there's a nurse coming in here at about four and then I shall go to bed." She led them down the hall, halting ever so slightly outside Dunstan's door, half pausing to hear the footsteps of the nurse on guard there, explaining: "The fracture isn't fatal, but it's a horrid splintered one, and they must torture him some more to-morrow, the car upset; it threw Minga free, but it fell on him--and Terry's body----" Sard drew a long shuddering sigh. Somewhat bewildered the two parents waited to hear more. "But Terry," asked Mr. Gerould rather desperately, "how was it he was with Dunstan and Minga?" "They had stolen him from a prison gang working on the highway." It was curious that these three desperately anxious people half smiled with appreciation of Dunstan's and Minga's method, while they realized its deadly solemnity. The two Geroulds looked aghast. "The prison guard shot him like a rabbit." The girl turned a look of intense bitterness on the kindly man and woman standing there. "You see," said Sard, and her face and eyes were a mask of hardness, "Terry was sentenced to twenty years in prison at hard labor; it was thought to be a kind sentence; he was under the law, and the law must not be cheated." The girl's face was bitter in a way not good to see. The Mede and the Persian did not, however, meet it with cold logic. This was not a time for that.