“Men are the limit!” said Mrs. Torney to her sister, one day when they were sitting together in the kitchen.  “As I’ve said before, it’s a great pity there ain’t nothing else to do but marry, and nothing to marry but men!  It’s awful to think of the hundreds of women who spend their happiest hours going about doing the housework, and planning just what they’d do if their husbands was to be taken off suddenly!  Some girls can set around until they’re blue moulded, and never a feller to ask ’em, and others the boys’ll fret and pleg until they’re fit to be tied, with nerves!  Evvy you couldn’t marry off if she was Cleopatra on the Nile, and poor Julia could hang smallpox flags all over her, and every man in the place’d want her jest the same!  He wants her back, you see if he doesn’t!”

“I don’t know that he does,” said Emeline, knitting needles flashing slowly in her crippled fingers.  “Maybe that’s the trouble.”

“What’d he come on for, then?” demanded Mrs. Torney.  “Jest showing off, is he?  Or is it another woman?  The only difference between men reely seems to be that some wear baggy pants and own up to being sultans, and others don’t!” She spread her fingers inside the stocking she was darning, and eyed it severely.  “The idea of a man with a five-year-old girl sashaying round the country this way is ridiculous, to begin with,” said she indignantly.

“Has Ju seen him?” asked Mrs. Page.

“No, I’m pretty sure she hasn’t,” Mrs. Torney answered.  “She acks more like she was afraid to, than like she ackshally had.  She’d be real relieved to start fighting, but just now she’s like a hen that gets its chickens under its wings, and looks up and round and about, and don’t know whether it’s a hawk or a fox or a man with a knife that’s after her!”

“I don’t believe Julie hates him,” said her mother.  “I think she’d go back to him, if only for Anna’s sake—­if it seemed best for Anna.”

“For that matter, she’d go keep house for the gorilla at the Chutes if it seemed best for Anna!” Mrs. Torney concluded sagely.

It was only a day or two later that the telephone rang, and Julia, answering it, as she always did now, with chill foreboding in her heart, heard Barbara’s voice.

“Julie, dear, is it you?  Darling, we want you right away.  It’s Dad, Julie—­he’s terribly ill!” Barbara’s voice broke.  “He’s terribly ill!”

“What is it?” Julia asked, tense and pale.

“Oh, we don’t know!” Barbara gasped.  “Julie—­we—­and Mother’s quite wonderful!  Con’s coming right away, Janey’s here, and we’ve wired Ted.”

“Barbara, is it as bad as that?”

“I’m afraid so!” And again tears choked Barbara.  “Of course we don’t know.  He fell, right here in the garden.  Think if he’d been on the road, Julie, or in the street.  That was the first thing Mother said.  Mother’s too wonderful!  Richie was here, they carried him in.  And he wrote Con’s and Ted’s and your name on a piece of paper.  We saw he was trying to say something, and gave him the paper, and that’s what he wrote!  And Aunt Sanna in New York!”