She was sorry that he could not have the better place, glad that he would not be leaving home, but she knew no way of talking to her children except with an exaggerated snap.

"Gee! to think what a hundred dollars would do!" his brother went on.

Cole held himself quiet. He could n't and would n't. He needed it himself more than Dan could understand. He kept still, his lips tightly pressed together. He ate no more. Elinor, his sister, broke in:

"A hundred dollars! Less than that would give me everything I want. If I could have just four or five lessons of Schmidt! He 's here just now for a few weeks, taking his summer vacation. Ten dollars a lesson! Why not dream of the moon?"

Every one looked drearily impatient.

"It would even be good business," she went on, dreaming. "The people of this little town don't know much, still, a pupil of Herr Schmidt could get about twice as many pupils. And think what it would mean to me!"

"That's it," said her mother; "it 's always that way. I try to give you enough music so that you can teach, and then you must have more-always more."

Dan broke out desperately:

"Sometimes I've thought I'd try to borrow the money to get to Chicago."

All of them stared at him in horror. They had just succeeded in paying off the debt on the miserable little house they lived in-a debt of seven hundred dollars left by their father's long illness before his death. The struggle to pay that had left scars and burns on every soul. Every dollar had meant giving up sufficient nour

happiness or pride, a sacrifice of health. It had meant doing without the little pleasures that make youth what it is. Every dollar of it had been torn from them as a rack might have torn it.

"Where will you get it?" sneered Cole. He sneered because he was afraid his brother could get it in some way.

"Debt!" shrieked the mother. "You 'd go into debt again! You'd get sick and fail some way, and then we 'd have it to pay. As if I have n't all I can stand now! It's little enough I ask you to do for me but staying out of debt."

Dan's face was hard. He knew he could not borrow. He was not sure he would have confidence enough to try even if the people at home had wished him to. His mother looked at his face and mis

understood. Her usual complaining tone stopped. There was desperation in her.

"If you borrow," she said, and her tone was cold bitterness, "I shall kill myself." The passion on her face lighted the same look on the faces of her children. They could not borrow money. Not knowing that she had made her point, she declared shrilly, through her tears, that she had worked her fingers to the bone for ungrateful children. Her children looked at her with an exasperated dreariness, yet Cole ached with the knowledge that the fear of a dependent old age was always upon her.

"I won't," said Dan, quietly. Then his exasperation at the world broke forth: "I'll stay here, I suppose, in this little one-horse town, at a little one-horse job, and starve along forever. I could do that work; I know I could do it. But I'll never see money enough to take me there."

Cole could not stand the hurt. Half consciously he started to take the money from his pocket.

Then Elinor's voice came through the silence:

"Think of the class I could have! I could soon pay the money all back, easily. If I could only get it! But what's the use?"

She got up and went to her piano. As Cole opened the door he heard her begin a gay little song. On the third note her voice broke.

"I've got a hundred dollars, and it 's got to do the work of about five""

On the porch stood his brother, sullenly gazing down the street.

"See here, Cole," he began suddenly, "I'm going to get married. I know about mother; I'll try to do something for her, too." He hesitated. He knew how little 'he could do with his present wages if he married. "But," he added, and his eyes were dogged, "I 'm going to get married."

Cole saw his brother's eyes. Dan's face was thin and tired. Cole looked down the street. He knew he would see her coming. She was what Dan was waiting for. They met on a corner only a block away. Cole had seen her every day for a year or more, but he looked at her to-day as if he had never seen her. A thin thing she was, with a way of gnawing her under lip.

As he looked at them suddenly a great ache filled him, a bitterness and a sadness and a strange, grim joy. Dan must have his chance. He must have the other job; then he could send for the girl. And they would do well enough, so that if anything should happen to him his mother would have a home. He put his hand into his pocket and touched the hundred.

Then Elinor's voice came through the window singing the gay little song. Cole knew that Dan must have the money, that he could n't keep it from him; and then Elinor's voice broke again.

He felt a sudden rage at her for singing, for wanting to have more, for existing at all. And he knew that his anger at her was a certain passion of tenderness. She must have the money he had.

All afternoon he puzzled vaguely over it, knowing it must be solved, not knowing how. He went home to supper, still not knowing how.

At last he heard his mother again:

"Jenny was n't here at all at noon, and she 's late now. She might let me know when she 's going to do such a thing. Here I waited and waited to clear off the table."

"It's the first time she ever did that," said Cole, worried.

"Well, here she comes at last," returned his mother, grudgingly.

Jenny came in without spirit. She took off her faded jacket slowly.

"I was so tired, I just lay down on the sofa at the office at noon," was her explanation; "and I was so slow this afternoon that I could n't get the work done till now."

Her mother poured out a cup of tea. "You'd have shown more sense to come home and eat. Hurry and get something now."

Then Jenny did the first unusual thing of her life: she caught hold of a chair suddenly, and fell into it, fainting. All the blood in Cole's body stopped for a moment. He thought she might be dead. Then he heard the bitter things his mother said: "What can you expect? Goes without her meals, then, of course, she tumbles over. Now I suppose she 'll think she can't go back to the office to-morrow, and we'll have to have a doctor. Always

"She even had a new waist to wear with her shabby suit"

somewhere to put money-the money we have n't got." She shook Jenny with exasperation and anxiety strangely mingled, holding a cup of tea for her to drink as she came to herself.

Cole could n't blame her. It was not only that she did not care greatly for Jenny. Dan was the only one whom she had had time to love. But Jenny's wages helped keep the little house running. His mother's anger was the desperation of an animal on which the trap has closed.

The doctor came, and Cole listened gravely to his diagnosis. Then, under cover of seeing the doctor to the door, he put on his hat and overcoat and went out into the night air.

Overwork. Of course. They did n't have to pay two dollars to hear that. She had worked six years at this one place without a vacation, long hours, hating the work. They could have told the doctor what it was. Cole walked the streets in a dull distress that seemed to him like hatred. What did people do when everything happened at once? And things were always happening at once. Especially when they were all poor and sick and unprepared to get a living. How could he manage it?

How did men manage who were the fathers of families? How would it seem if he were responsible for Dan and Elinor being in the world, and yet not being able to live-to live in any real sense, to find themselves and their work, and to be able to do it? And Jenny- There he stopped. He walked the streets for nearly an hour before he found himself in any coherent train of thought.

Why were human beings brought into the world who were not even going to have the chance to be human? Oddly, the figure of the girl who walked down the street with Dan haunted him as much that night as did his brother and sisters. He could almost see her in front of him, thin, and with her teeth gnawing her under lip. How could they stand it? Was this the reason men robbed? Why should n't he stop a man on the street? What if Dan should commit crimes? Yet most

men, caught so, did not. Finally he settled down to walk steadily, figuring it out. An hour later he opened the house door. His mother was crying.

"Here we all are in such trouble," she began bitterly, "and you don't care enough even to stay at home. A lot of interest you take in anything! And Jenny will be out of the office two or three days and maybe more. And what we 'll do without her salary I don't know, specially with the two dollars for the doctor to-night." Cole hardly heard. He was trying to straighten out a way. The next morning he caught Dan.

"I've got a hundred dollars, and it 's got to do the work of about five, as near as I can calculate it."

Dan stared, speechless.

"It will take about twenty-five dollars to give Jenny a chance to go away and take a week's rest, even if she goes to that cheap little place the girls were talking about. She'll spend fifteen, and eight to mother for the week she 's not earning anything, and two to the doctor."

Dan stood in weary, discouraged lines. At the next word he stood straight.

"You can take the other seventy-five. It'll just take you to Chicago and pay for one week's board and room. If you don't get your job, you'll be pushed right off the jumping-off place, because I won't have a red cent to send you, you know."

Dan's white face turned whiter. "You mean you 'll send me to Chicago?" he gasped. "You can't!"

"Yes, I can. But there's just one thing I want. This leaves Nell out in the cold. She ain't going to be left. You 've got to promise to begin sending the money back as soon as you get a jobevery bit you can."

"I will, if I starve for it."

"And"-Cole paused a moment-"that seventy-five has got to be back here before you 're married."

Dan looked at him.

"Every cent," he said slowly. "And I'll never forget you, Cole."

The next thing was to persuade Jenny as well as his mother. She protested that

she really did n't need it, that she would be at the office in a day or so.

Cole argued that she must. Then she turned sullen and became impossible to manage. If Cole had been aware of any particular affection for Jenny, this might have stopped him. As it was, he had a cold conviction that they could not afford to have Jenny break down. He argued on that line, the only argument that could have broken Jenny's sullenness. The plain truth was that she was afraid of any new departure, and had no idea how she would go about it to have a holiday. It embarrassed her, and she made bitter remarks.

He got her off at last. She even had a new waist to wear with her shabby suit. Elinor had seen to that.

"You 're a good kid," said Cole to Elinor, awkwardly, when he saw it.

"She don't get much," answered Elinor, as awkwardly.

He wanted to tell her that he was planning to give her a chance, too, but a fear of all the things that might happen to prevent it kept him back.

Dan told his mother good-by the next day. Her tears and reproaches weakened him nearly to the point of staying, but not quite. Horrible fear gnawed at her. He was taking a chance, and the chance had usually turned out wrong in her life. And she was hungry for even a little surety of safety even in the poorest and most wretched way of living.

Dan did not understand her passion as he left, though he felt dimly that her affection for him had something to do with

it.

Cole began to wait for a letter when Dan had been gone a day. He imagined everything gone wrong. Then he tried to plan things going well. It was harder work; he found his imagination not trained along that line. On the fourth day he got a letter from Dan. It read:

Dear Cole: I got the job. Twenty-two a week. Living here will be about four a week higher, so I ought really to be able to count on eight a week over.

His shock of relief made him laugh.

After all, he reasoned with himself, he need not have been so surprised. Dan had been promised the job. If he had not been, there was n't courage enough in the whole family to chance it, Cole thought bitterly.

He

Courage! Well, was it courage to chance mother and Nell and Jenny? And Dan had to think of the thin girl who had walked down the street with him. found himself picturing Dan sick in Chicago, Dan not capable of holding his job. And then he jerked his mind. loose again.

Jenny came home stronger than she had been. She started to work again.

They had held her place for her; he had wondered if they would. She now seemed much stronger, yet now and then she had strangely

Then came the day that he got another letter from Dan. He tore it open with the strange, sick fear he often had nowadays. Dan inclosed a money-order for ten dollars. Things whirled around Cole for a moment, and he caught at a picketfence to stand straight. In some way he knew that he had never expected it to turn out as he had reasoned it. But there were the ten dollars, and Dan's letter said that thought that, barring accidents, he could do it every week.

he

Then Cole went home and arranged with Elinor, and she went to take her first lesson that day, with Dan's ten dollars in her glove.

"You 're to get all the pupils you

can, of course," Cole told her, "and any that come after you begin taking lessons of Schmidt are to count in paying me back this seventyfive. I need it right away; I'll tell you straight."

"I'm sure I can," Elinor said. Her eyes changed swiftly. How could she think of pupils or of money when she was going to have an opportunity like that! She jumped suddenly from her seat; then she stopped. She