"I don't care what you do," Jeremy shouted. "You can tell anyone you
like. I don't care what you do. You're a beastly woman."

She turned upon him, her face purple. "That's enough, Master
Jeremy," she said, her voice low and trembling. "I'm not here to be
called names by such as you. You'll be sorry for this before you're
much older. . . . You see."

There was then an awful and sickly pause. Jeremy seemed to himself
to be sinking lower and lower into a damp clammy depth of
degradation. What must this world be that it could change itself so
instantly from a place of gay and happy pleasure into a dim groping
room of punishment and dismay?

His feelings were utterly confused. He supposed that he was terribly
wicked. But he did not feel wicked. He only felt miserable, sick and
defiant. Mary and Helen came in, their eyes open to a crisis, their
bodies tuned sympathetically to the atmosphere of sin and crime that
they discerned around them.

Then Mr. Cole came in as was his daily habit--for a moment before
his breakfast.

"Well, here are you all," he cried. "Ready for to-night? No
breakfast yet? Why, now . . . ?"

Then perceiving, as all practised fathers instantly must, that the
atmosphere was sinful, he changed his voice to that of the
Children's Sunday Afternoon Service--a voice well known in his