“I’m afraid you’ll be lonesome.”

“I don’t know why I should be any more lonesome than I always have been.  All I see of you is at meals and while you’re readin’ nights.  You’re just like your pa.  If I propped up a book by the lamp, it would be just as sociable as it is to have you settin’ here.  Readin’ is a good thing in its place and I enjoy it myself, but sometimes it’s pleasant to hear the human voice sayin’ somethin’ besides ‘What?’ and ‘Yes’ and ’All right’ and ‘Is supper ready?’

[Sidenote:  The Blue Hair Ribbon]

“I’ve been lookin’ over your things to-day and gettin’ ’em ready.  The moths has ate your Winter flannels and you’ll have to get more.  I’ve mended your coat linin’s and sewed on buttons, and darned and patched, and I’ve took Barbara North’s blue hair ribbon back to her—­the one you found some place and had in your pocket.  You mustn’t be careless about those things, Roger—­she might think you meant to steal it.”

“What did Barbara say?” he stammered.  The high colour had mounted to his temples.

“She didn’t know what to say at first, but she recognised it as her hair ribbon.  I told her you hadn’t meant to steal it—­that you’d just found it somewheres and had forgot to give it to her, and it was all right.  She laughed some, but it was a funny laugh.  You must be careful, Roger—­you won’t always have your mother to get you out of scrapes.”

Roger wondered if the knot of blue ribbon that had so strangely gone back to Barbara had, by any chance, carried to her its intangible freight of dreams and kisses, with a boyish tear or two, of which he had the grace not to be ashamed.

“Your pa was in the habit of annexin’ female belongin’s, though the Lord knows where he ever got ’em.  I suppose he picked ’em up on the street—­he was so dreadful absent-minded.  He was systematic about ’em in a way, though.  After he died, I found ’em all put away most careful in a box—­a handkerchief and one kid glove, and a piece of ribbon about like the one I took back to Barbara.  He was flighty sometimes:  constant devotion to readin’ had unsettled his mind.

“That brings me to what I wanted to say when I first started out.  I don’t want you should load up your trunk with your pa’s books to the exclusion of your clothes, and I don’t want you to spend your evenin’s readin’.”

“I’m not apt to read very much, Mother, if I work in an office in the daytime and go to law school at night.”

[Sidenote:  Ten Books Only]

“That’s so, too, but there’s Sundays.  You can take any ten of your pa’s books that you like, but no more.  I’ll keep the rest here against the time the train is blocked and the mails don’t come through.  I may get a taste for your pa’s books myself.”

Roger did not think it likely, but he was too wise to say so.

“And I didn’t tell you this before, but I’ve made it my business to go and see the Judge and tell him how you saved my life at the expense of Fido’s.  I don’t know when I’ve seen a man so mad.  I was goin’ to suggest that we get him another dog from some place, and land sakes! he clean drove it out of my mind.