“I have something beautiful for breakfast to-morrow morning, papa,” said Charlotte, “and I know how to make coffee.”  And he felt that it was worth while living for to-morrow morning’s breakfast alone.  No doubt this state of mind, as abnormal in its way as the other had been, was largely due to physical causes, to the unprosaic quantity of food in a stomach which had been cheated of its needs for a number of days.  The blood rushed through his veins with the added force of reaction, supplying his brain.  He was not happier—­that could scarcely be said—­but he was swinging in the opposite direction.  Whereas he had wanted to die, because of his misery and failures, he now wanted to live, to repair them, and the thought was dawning upon him, to take revenge because of them.  In this mood the consideration of the bottle of chloroform in his pocket became more and more humiliating and condemning.  The sight of the girl’s innocent, triumphant, loving little face opposite overwhelmed him with a stinging consciousness of it all.  He felt at one minute a terrible fear lest those clear young eyes of hers could penetrate his miserable secret, lest she should say, suddenly:  “Papa, what did you go to Port Willis for?  What have you in your pocket?”

Charlotte went to bed early, after she had cleared away the table and washed the dishes, unwonted tasks for her, but which she performed with a delight intensified by a feeling of daring.

“Papa, I have washed the dishes beautifully; I know I have,” she said, and she looked at him for praise, her head on one side, her look half-whimsical, half-childishly earnest.  “I don’t see why it is at all hard work to be a maid,” said she.

“There are other things to do, dear, I suppose,” Carroll said.

“I think I could easily learn to do the other things,” said she.  “I don’t quite know about the washing and ironing, and possibly the scrubbing and sweeping.”  Charlotte surveyed, as she spoke, her hands.  She looked at the little, pink palms, made pinker and slightly wrinkled by the dish-water; she turned them and surveyed the backs with the slightly scalloping joints, and the thin-nailed fingers.  She shook her head.  “I don’t know,” said she, again.

“I know,” Carroll said, quickly.  “Your father is going to take care of you, Charlotte.  It has not yet come to that pass that he is quite helpless.”

Charlotte did not seem to notice his hurt, indignant tone.  She went on reflectively.  “It does seem,” said she, “as if there were a great many ways of being crippled besides not having all your arms and legs; as if it were really being very much crippled if you are in a place where there is work to be done, and your hands are not rightly made for doing it.  Now here I am, and I can’t do Marie’s work as well as Marie did it, because she was really born with hands for washing and ironing and scrubbing and sweeping, and I wasn’t.  A person is really crippled when she is born unfitted to do the things that come her way to be done, isn’t she, papa?”