She hoped that he would come soon. She would have the house ready for him in a few days. St. John’s Park that had been way uptown when they moved in was already slipping downtown. It was mighty pretty, though, and the water when it came would make it a paradise of convenience. She reminded him to keep the children off the highway and away from those miserable Lashers. Her solemn edicts were as girlishly innocent as her gayeties. It made bitter reading, that warning—that _ex post facto_ warning—against the Lashers. Whatever happened she must never know this blighting truth. In a few days Immy was playing in the yard again. She seemed to have forgotten her experience as she forgot the nightmares that sometimes woke her screaming from sleep. But now and then she would cast upon her father a look of amazement. In her games with Keith she shrieked more easily in a wilder alarm. Her shrieks stabbed RoBards and made him dread that the experience had worked some permanent injury in the fabric of the child’s soul. All the ignorance that had been wrapped about her youth for her protection was gone now. The blindfold had been snatched from her eyes. The questions that she had been rebuked for asking, were brutally answered and yet left unanswered. The beauty, the mystery, the holiness of innocence had been torn like the rent veil in the temple, and only the uglier knowledge vouchsafed. And a stain had been cast upon her indelibly. She would be regarded with pity and yet with horror forever. She was branded with all the curses of abominable sin, though she had had no choice, no share, no understanding of it. And such things could happen in a world where the fall of a sparrow was marked—marked but not prevented! Immy must at all costs be sheltered from any further hazards. It seemed unwise to take her to the city, where dangers thronged everywhere, and pollution increased hourly. But when he hinted that it might be better not to go to town for the procession, Immy almost went into a convulsion of protest. She pleaded that she had a special right to see the parade because she had been so badly hurt. RoBards granted the prayer to silence the argument. He wondered if Jud Lasher had left yet, but dared not ask. When he rode past the hut, he put spurs to his horse lest the mother accost him again, but his sidelong glances never caught a glimpse of Jud. He did not know that the wretch had lain abed for days while his bruises mended and that when he was up again and saw RoBards in the road, he ran and hid, stealing out again to shake his fist at the vanishing figure and gibber new threats. At length the parade day drew near. Mr. and Mrs. Albeson decided to go in the farm wagon drawn by their own team. Mrs. Albeson would not risk her bones in the steam railroad and she quenched her husband’s enthusiasm for an experimental ride on the devil-wagons. She cooked a dinner and a supper for RoBards and the children and set the table for them and drove off.