He said if you'd only let him alone and not given it to him, he'd have grown up to be a good man--and now he couldn't! I never heard anything so heart-rending--he was so weak he could hardly whisper, but he kept trying to talk, telling us over and over it was all your fault." In the darkness Mr.Williams' facial expression could not be seen, but his voice sounded hopeful.
"Is he--is he still in a great deal of pain ?" "They say the crisis is past," said Margaret, "but the doctor's still up there.

He said it was the acutest case of indigestion he had ever treated in the whole course of his professional practice." "Of course _I_ didn't know what he'd do with the dollar," said Robert.
She did not reply.
He began plaintively, "Margaret, you don't----" "I've never seen papa and mamma so upset about anything," she said, rather primly.
"You mean they're upset about ME ?" "We ARE all very much upset," returned Margaret, more starch in her tone as she remembered not only Penrod's sufferings but a duty she had vowed herself to perform.
"Margaret! YOU don't----" "Robert," she said firmly and, also, with a rhetorical complexity which breeds a suspicion of pre-rehearsal--"Robert, for the present I can only look at it in one way: when you gave that money to Penrod you put into the hands of an unthinking little child a weapon which might be, and, indeed was, the means of his undoing.

Boys are not respon----" "But you saw me give him the dollar, and you didn't----" "Robert!" she checked him with increasing severity.

"I am only a woman and not accustomed to thinking everything out on the spur of the moment; but I cannot change my mind.

Not now, at least." "And you think I'd better not come in to-night ?" "To-night!" she gasped.