“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 passed 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.