“I’m quite satisfied,” he replied to her, making a repellant motion towards the watch and dangling chain glittering in the electric-light.

“Very well, then,” said Ellen, and she threw the chain over her neck.

“You just bring that I O U to the shop to-mor-mor,” said Evarts to Andrew; then, with a “Good-evening,” he was off.  They heard him hail an electric-car passing, and that, although he never took a car, but walked to save the fare.  He had been often heard to say that he for one did not support the street railroad.

After he had gone, Ellen turned to her father, and flung a silent white arm slipping from her sleeve loose around his neck, and pulled his head to her shoulder.  “Now look here, father,” she said, “you’ve been through lots to-day, and you’d better go to bed and go to sleep.  I don’t think mother was waked up—­if she had been, she would have been out here.”

“Look here, Ellen, I want to tell you,” Andrew began, pitifully.  He was catching his breath like a child with sobs.

“I don’t want to hear anything,” replied Ellen, firmly.  “Whatever you did was right, father.”

“I ought to tell you, Ellen!”

“You ought to tell me nothing,” said Ellen.  “You are all tired out, father.  You can’t do anything that isn’t right for me.  Now go to bed and go to sleep.”

Ellen stroked her father’s thin gray hair with exactly the same tender touch with which he had so often stroked her golden locks.  It was an inheritance of love reverting to its original source.  She kissed him on his lined forehead with her flower-like lips, then she pushed him gently away.  “Go softly, and don’t wake mother,” whispered she; “and, father, there’s no need to trouble her with this.  Good-night.”

Chapter XXXIV

Ellen’s deepest emotion was pity for her father, so intense that it was actual physical pain.

“Poor father!  Poor father!  He had to borrow the money to buy me my watch and chain,” she kept repeating to herself.  “Poor father!”

To her New England mind, borrowing seemed almost like robbing.  She actually felt as if her father had committed a crime for love of her, but all she looked at was the love, not the guilt.  Suddenly a conviction which fairly benumbed her came over her—­the money in the savings-bank; that little hoard, which had been to the imagination of herself and her mother a sheet-anchor against poverty, must be gone.  “Father must have used if for something unbeknown to mother,” she said to herself—­“he must, else he would not have told Mr. Evarts that he could not pay him.”  It was a hot night, but the girl shivered as she realized for the first time the meaning of the wolf at the door.  “All we’ve got left is this house—­this house and—­and—­our hands,” thought Ellen.  She saw before her her father’s poor, worn hands, her mother’s thin, tired hands, jerking the thread in and out of those shameful wrappers; then she looked at her own, as yet untouched by toil, as white and small and fair as flowers.  She thought of the four years before her at college, four years before she could earn anything—­and in the mean time?  She looked at the pile of her school-books on the table.  She had been studying hard all summer.  The thirst for knowledge was as intense in her as the thirst for stimulants in a drunkard.