John shook his head.  “Really grown up, aren’t you, Lydia?  Do you enjoy being a young lady?”

“Yes, I do, only I miss the old days when I saw so much of you.”

“Do you, my dear?” asked Levine, eagerly.  “In what ways do you miss me?”

“Oh, every way!  No one will ever understand me as you do.”

“Oh, I don’t know.  There are Billy and Kent.”

Lydia shook her head, though Billy’s face in the moonlight after the graduation party, returned unexpectedly to her memory as she did so.

“There’ll never be any one like you.”  Then moved by a sudden impulse she leaned toward him and said, “No matter what happens, you will always know that I love you, won’t you, Mr. Levine?”

John looked at the wistful face, keenly.  “Why, what could happen, young Lydia?”

“Oh, lots of things!  I’m grown up now and—­and I have to make decisions about the rightness and the wrongness of things.  But no matter what I decide, nothing can change my love for you.”

“Lydia, come here,” said Levine, abruptly.

In the old way, Lydia came to his side and he pulled her down to the arm of his chair.  For a moment they sat in silence, his arm about her, her cheek against his hair, staring into the glowing stove.

“When you were just a little tot,” said Levine at last, “you were full of gumption and did your own thinking.  And I’ve been glad to see you keep the habit.  Always make your own decisions, dear.  Don’t let me or any one else decide matters of conscience for you.  ’To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’  Eh, little girl?”

He rose as he heard Amos coming in the back door, and with his hand under Lydia’s chin, he looked long and earnestly into her eyes.  Then as Billy had done earlier in the evening, he sighed, “Oh, Lydia!  Lydia!” and turned away.

CHAPTER XV

THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

“Nothing is so proud or so brave as the young pine when it first tops the rest of the forest.”—­The Murmuring Pine.

For several days Lydia was unhappy and absent-minded.  At first, in her thoughts she was inclined to blame Billy for forcing this turmoil of mind on her.  But, a little later, she admitted to herself that for years, something within her had been demanding that she take a stand on the Indian question something to which Charlie Jackson and Billy had appealed, something which Kent and John Levine had ignored.  Yet neither Charlie nor Billy had really forced her to a decision.

Lydia was grown up.  All her young life she had carried the responsibilities and had faced the home tragedies that come usually only to grown folk.  Now, in her young womanhood it was natural and inevitable that she should turn to the larger responsibilities of the living world about her in order to satisfy the larger needs of her maturity.