The Squire stared at him a second, then his great chest heaved with silent laughter and his yellow beard stirred as with a breeze of mirth.

“You don’t object to my daughter’s presence?” he queried, his eyes twinkling still, but with the formality with which he might have addressed the minister.

Jerome scowled with important indignation.  Nothing escaped him; he saw that Squire Merritt was laughing at him.  Again the pitiful rebellion at his state of boyhood seized him.  He would have torn out of the room had it not been for his dire need.  He looked straight at the Squire, and nodded stubbornly.

Squire Merritt turned to his little daughter and laid a tenderly heavy hand on her smooth curled head.  “You’d better run away now and see mother, Pretty,” he said.  “Father has some business to talk over with this gentleman.”

Little Lucina gave a bewildered look up in her father’s face, then another at Jerome, as if she fancied she had not heard aright, then she went out obediently, like the good and gentle little girl that she was.

When the door closed behind her, Jerome began at once.  Somehow, that other child’s compassion in the midst of her comfort and security had brought his courage up to the point of attack on fate.

“I want to ask you about the mortgage,” said Jerome.

The Squire looked at him with quick interest.  “The mortgage on your father’s place?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Doctor Prescott holds it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much is it?”

“A thousand dollars.”  Jerome said that with a gasp of horror and admiration at the vastness of it.  Sometimes to him that thousand dollars almost represented infinity, and seemed more than the stars of heaven.  His childish brain, which had scarcely contemplated in verity more than a shilling at a time of the coin of the realm, reeled at a thousand dollars.

“Well?” observed Squire Merritt, kindly but perplexedly.  He wondered vaguely if the boy had come to ask him to pay the mortgage, and reflected how little ready money he had in pocket, for Eben Merritt was not thrifty with his income, which was indeed none too large, and was always in debt himself, though always sure to pay in time.  Chances were, if Squire Merritt had had the thousand dollars to hand that morning, he might have thrust it upon the boy, with no further parley, taken his rod and line, and gone forth to his fishing.  As it was, he waited for Jerome to proceed, merely adding that he was sorry that his mother did not own the place clear.

The plan that the boy unfolded, clumsily but sturdily to the end, he had thought out for himself in the darkness of the night before.  The Squire listened.  “Who planned this out?” he asked, when Jerome had finished.

“I did.”

“Who helped you?”

“Nobody did.”

“Nobody?”

“No, sir.”

Suddenly Squire Eben Merritt seated himself in the chair which Jerome had vacated, seized the boy, and set him upon his knee.  Jerome struggled half in wrath, half in fear, but he could not free himself from that strong grasp.  “Sit still,” ordered Squire Eben.  “How old are you, my boy?”