Meanwhile Sam Kimper went on, after the humble manner in which he had begun, to try to bring his family to his new standard of respectability.  He introduced family prayers, much to the disgust of his son Tom and the amusement of his daughter Mary.  The privacy of family affairs was not entirely respected by the Kimper family, for Sam soon heard remarks from street loafers, as he passed along, which indicated that the devotional exercises of the family had been reported, evidently by his own children, and he heard quotations from some of his weak and halting prayers pass from mouth to mouth and elicit peals of coarse laughter.

Nevertheless he found some encouragement.  His son Tom was not quite so much of a cub at home as he had been, and actually took to trying, in a desultory way, to find work, although his father’s offer to teach him the trade which had been learned in the penitentiary was declined very sharply and without any thanks whatever.  Billy, the younger boy, had an affectionate streak in his nature, which his father succeeded in touching to such an extent that complaints of Billy’s truancy were nowhere near so numerous as they had been just after his father’s return.  Mary, the youngest daughter, was a less promising subject.  Her precocity was of a very unpleasant order, and caused her father a great deal of annoyance.

When everything else failed him, Sam had the baby for consolation.  The little wretch had been so utterly uncared for since its appearance that it seemed surprised for some time by its father’s demonstrations of affection, but finally the meaning of this seemed made known to it, probably in the way the same meanings are translated to babies everywhere else, and from being a forlorn and fretful child it gradually became so cheerful that its own mother began to display some interest in it and make a plaything of it, to her own manifest advantage.

But Jane, the elder daughter, who was a woman in stature and already knew more of the world than is good for women in general, was a constant source of anxiety to Sam.  Many a night the unhappy father lingered in the neighborhood of the hotel, seeking for an opportunity to see his daughter and talk with her; not that he had much to say, but that he hoped by his presence to keep more congenial company away from her.  When he heard any village gossip in the house, he always could trace it to his daughter Jane.  Whenever Mary broke out with some new and wild expression of longing, he understood who put it into her mind.  Whenever his wife complained that she was not so well dressed as some other women whose husbands were plain workmen, and expressed a wish for some tawdry bit of finery, Sam could trace the desire, by very little questioning, back to his daughter Jane.

He prayed about it, thought about it, groaned over it, wept over it, and still saw no means within his power to bring the girl back to an interest in her family and to bring her up so that she should not disgrace the name which he was trying to rehabilitate.  But the more thought and effort he gave to the subject, the less seemed his chance of success.