“And all the time he is afraid that he will have to back up against a fence sometime to hide his patches from you,” laughed Roxanne in such merriment that anybody with any sense of pleasant humor would have joined her at the thought of the Idol and me dancing a minuet to keep out of each other’s way.

The way Roxanne feels about her brother is the way I feel about Father even after I saw that article in the magazine.  He is my father and nobody is wholly bad.  I always will love him devotedly and go to him with my sorrows.

At night in the study of Roxanne’s forefathers, before the log fire where the fifth old Colonel Byrd used to entertain Andrew Jackson, I told him all about that terrible starving that is going on down at the little cottage beyond the garden.

“Well,” said Father, in the voice I still think so noble and good and that still comforts me, “we’ll have to see to all that.  When I bought this place from young Byrd, I liked him better than any youngster I had met in a long time, and I offered him a better place out at the furnaces than he could fill.  I have tried to have him advanced twice, but the young stiffneck says he won’t have more than he earns.  Still he gets a hundred a month and things ought not to be so tight down at the Byrd nest.  Wonder what he does with the money?  He’s not a gamer, I take it.”

“Oh, Father, no!” I answered, shocked that anybody should think that of the Idol.  “It’s for the experiments that all the money goes.  Roxanne’s so proud of him for the wonderful thing he has discovered that she will starve herself to death, and him too, before all the world hears about it, even the Emperor of Germany.”

“Experiments?” Father asked, with a quick look that he has when business and things interest him very much.  “What experiments?”

“I can’t tell you that, for you’re the very person not to know,” I answered quickly, a little bit scared.

“Then don’t,” answered Father, looking me square in the face in a way that I wished that magazine could have seen.  “And if you have a secret of importance, don’t ever even hint it, Phil.”

“I won’t,” I answered, glad to see that he wasn’t going to ask any more about it all.

“And, Phil,” he continued, speaking slowly and looking at me as lovingly as any father could look at a daughter, even a poor one, “you go right ahead filling up the youngster and standing by the Byrds.  That’s what I want you to learn—­standing-by-ness.  Have the other ‘poor but prouds’ thawed to you to any extent?” I had told Father some of the ways Belle and the others had treated me, only not so as to hurt his feelings about his money being the cause of it.

“Some of them have and the others are going to, I think,” I said, even more hopefully than I really felt about it.

“Here’s hoping,” said Father, and this time he did laugh.

A great resolve has come into my mind since this talk with Father.  I am going to reform him about money-making if it takes me all my life.  He is too good a man for God not to have in heaven.  His honor must be saved.  Amen!