Under this attack, the man of the world collapsed into an awkward overgrown boy, ill at ease, with red lids to his eyes and premature yellow stains on two fingers of his left hand.  He shifted his feet and said defensively:  “Aw, she’s a woman.  A fellow can’t knock her down.  I wouldn’t let a man do it.”  He retreated still further, through another phase, and became a little boy, heated and recriminatory:  “I’d like to know who you are to talk!  You give in to your mother all the time!”

“I don’t give in to my mother; I mind her,” said Judith, drawing a distinction which Arnold could not follow but which he was not acute enough to attack other than by a jeering, “Oh, what a crawl!  What’s the diff?”

“And I mind her whether she’s there or not! I do!” continued Judith, pressing what she seemed, inexplicably to Arnold, to consider her advantage.

Sylvia was vexed with them for talking so loudly and getting so red-faced and being so generally out of key with the booming note of luxury resounding about them.  “Hush! hush!” she said; “don’t be so silly.  We ought to be going back.”

Arnold took her rebuke without protest.  Either something in this passage-at-arms had perversely brought a sudden impulse to his mind, or he had all along a purpose in his fantastic trip West.  As they reached the two ladies, he burst out, “Say, Madrina, why couldn’t I go on to La Chance and go to school there, and live with the Marshalls?”

Four amazed faces were turned on him.  His stepmother evidently thought him stricken with sudden insanity and strove distractedly to select, from the heaped pile of her reasons for so thinking, some few which might be cited without too great offense to her brother’s mode of life:  “Why, what a strange idea, Arnold!  What ever made you think of such a thing? You wouldn’t like it!” She was going on, as in decency bound, to add that it would be also rather a large order for the Marshalls to adopt a notably “difficult” boy, when Judith broke in with a blunt divination of what was in her aunt’s mind.  “You’d have to wash dishes if you came to our house,” she said, “and help peel potatoes, and weed the celery bed.”

“I’d like it!” declared Arnold.  “We’d have lots of fun.”

“I bet we would!” said Judith, with an unexpected assent.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith laughed gently.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you silly boy.  You never did an hour’s work in your life!”

Arnold sat down by Mrs. Marshall.  “I wouldn’t be in the way, would I?” he said, with a clumsy pleading.  He hesitated obviously over the “Mother” which had risen to his lips, the name he had had for her during the momentous visit of five years before, and finally, blushing, could not bring it out.  “I’d like it like anything! I wouldn’t be ...  I’d be different!  Sylvie and Judy seem like little sisters to me.”  The red on his face deepened.  “It’s—­it’s good for a fellow to have sisters, and a home,” he said in a low tone not audible to his stepmother’s ears.