Amos pulled at his pipe and shook his head. "You will but I won't. It isn't in our blood."

"Shucks, Amos. Where's your nerve?"

Amos looked at Levine silently for a moment. Then he said huskily,

"My nerve is gone with Patience. And if she isn't in heaven, there isn't one, that's all."

Lydia looked up from her story with a quick flash of tragedy in her eyes.

"Well," said John, smiling at her gently, "if you don't want to be rich, Amos, Lydia does. I'll give her the cottage here, the first fifty thousand I make off of Indian pine lands."

"I swan," exclaimed Amos, "if you do that, I'll buy a cow and a pig and some chickens and I can pretty near make a living right here."

"You're foolish, Amos. This isn't New England. This is the West. All you've got to do is to keep your nerve, and any one with sense can make a killing. Opportunity screams at you."

"I guess she's always on my deaf side," said Amos.

"When I grow up," said Lydia, suddenly, "I'm going to buy a ship and sail to Africa and explore the jungles."

"I'll go with you, Lydia,", exclaimed Levine, "hanged if I don't sell my Indian lands for real money, and go right along with you."

"Mr. Marshall says 'like h.e.l.l you'll get some Indian lands,'" mused the child.

Both men exclaimed together, "What!"

Lydia was confused but repeated her conversation with Marshall.

"So that's the way the wind blows," said Levine.

"You don't think for a minute there's a banker in town without one hand on the reservation," said Amos. "Lydia, you're old enough now not to repeat conversations you hear at home. Don't you ever tell anybody the things you hear me and Mr. Levine talk over. Understand?" sharply.

"Yes, Daddy," murmured Lydia, flushing painfully.

"You don't have to jaw the child that way, Amos." Levine's voice was impatient. "Just explain things to her. Why do you want to humiliate her?"

Amos gave a short laugh. "Takes a bachelor to bring up kids. Run along to bed, Lydia."

"Lydia's not a kid. She's a grown-up lady in disguise," said Levine, catching her hand as she pa.s.sed and drawing her to him. "Good night, young Lydia! If you were ten years older and I were ten years younger--"

Lydia smiled through tear-dimmed eyes. "We'd travel!" she said.

Cold weather set in early this year. Before Thanksgiving the lake was ice-locked for the winter. The garden was flinty, and on Thanksgiving Day, three inches of snow fell. The family rose in the dark. Amos, with his dinner pail, left the house an hour before Lydia and the sun was just flushing the brown tree tops when she waved good-by to little Patience, whose lovely little face against the window was the last thing she saw in the morning, the first thing she saw watching for her return in the dusk of the early winter evening.

Amos, always a little moody and a little restless, since the children's mother had gone to her last sleep, grew more so as the end of the year approached. It was perhaps a week before Christmas on a Sunday afternoon that he called Lydia to him. Patience was having her nap and Lizzie had gone to call on Mrs. Norton.

Lydia, who was re-reading "The Water Babies," put it down reluctantly and came to her father's side. Her heart thumped heavily. Her father's depressed voice meant just one thing--money trouble.

He was very gentle. He put his hand on the dusty yellow of her hair.

He was very careful of the children's hair. Like many New England farm lads he was a jack of all trades. He clipped Lydia's hair every month himself.

"Your hair will be thick enough in another year, so's I won't have to cut it any more, Lydia. It's coming along thick as felt. Wouldn't think it was once thin, now."

Lydia eyed her father's care-lined face uneasily. Amos still hesitated.

"Where'd you get that dress, my dear?" he asked.

"Lizzie and I made it of that one of mother's," answered the child.

"It isn't made so awful good, but I like to wear it, because it was hers."

"Yes, yes," said Amos absently.

The dress was a green serge, clumsily put together as a sailor suit, and the color fought desperately with the transparent blue of the little girl's eyes.

"Lydia," said her father abruptly. "You're a big girl now. You asked for skates and a sled for Christmas. My child, I don't see how you children are going to have anything extra for Christmas, except perhaps a little candy and an orange. That note with Marshall comes due in January. By standing Levine off on the rent, I can rake and sc.r.a.pe the interest together. It's hopeless for me even to consider meeting the note. What Marshall will do, I don't know. If I could ever get on my feet--with the garden. But on a dollar and a half a day, I swan--"

"No Christmas at all?" quavered Lydia. "Won't we even hang up our stockings?"

"If you'll be contented just to put a little candy in them. Come, Lydia, you're too big to hang up your stocking, anyhow."

Lydia left her father and walked over to the window. She pressed her face against the pane and looked back to the lake. The sun was sinking in a gray rift of clouds. The lake was a desolate plain of silvery gold touched with great shadows of purple where snow drifts were high.

As she looked, the weight on her chest lifted. The trembling in her hands that always came with the mention of money lessened. The child, even as early as this, had the greatest gift that life bestows, the power of deriving solace from sky and hill and sweep of water.

"Anyhow," she said to her father, "I've still got something to look forward to. I've got the doll house to give baby, and Mr. Levine always gives me a book for Christmas."

"That's a good girl!" Amos gave a relieved sigh, then went on with his brooding over his unlighted pipe.

And after all, this Christmas proved to be one of the high spots of Lydia's life. She had a joyous 24th. All the morning she spent in the woods on the Norton farm with her sled, cutting pine boughs. As she trudged back through the farmyard, Billy Norton called to her.

"Oh, Lydia!"

Lydia stopped her sled against a drift and waited for Billy to cross the farmyard. He was a large, awkward boy several years older than Lydia. He seemed a very homely sort of person to her, yet she liked his face. He was as fair as Kent was dark. Kent's features were regular and clean-cut. Billy's were rough hewn and irregular, and his hair and lashes were straight and blond.

What Lydia could not at this time appreciate was the fact that Billy's gray eyes were remarkable in the clarity and steadiness of their gaze, that his square jaw and mobile mouth were full of fine promise for his manhood and that even at sixteen the framework of his great body was magnificent.

He never had paid any attention to Lydia before and she was bashful toward the older boys.

"Say, Lydia, want a brace of duck? A lot of them settled at Warm Springs last night and I've got more than I can use."

He leaned his gun against the fence and began to separate two birds from the bunch hanging over his shoulder.

Lydia began to breathe quickly. The Dudleys could not afford a special Christmas dinner.

"I--I don't know how I could pay you, Bill--"

"Who wants pay?" asked Bill, indignantly.

"I dasn't take anything without paying for it," returned Lydia, her eyes still on the ducks. "But I'd--I'd rather have those than a ship."

Billy's clear gaze wandered from Lydia's thin little face to her patched mittens and back again.