at her questioningly); "and what made you set yourself such a task?"

Judy gave her curls a quick push off her hot forehead.

"(A) Faix, it was inborn in me," she answered instantly; "and
(B)--sure, and don't I lo-o-ove you and delaight to plaize you?"

He went in again slowly, thoughtfully. Judy always mystified
him. He understood her the least of any of his children, and
sometimes the thought of her worried him. At present she was only
a sharp, clever, and frequently impertinent child; but he felt
she was utterly different from the other six, and it gave him
an aggrieved kind of feeling when he thought about it, which was
not very often.

He remembered her own mother had often said she trembled for
Judy's future. That restless fire of hers that shone out of her
dancing eyes, and glowed scarlet on her cheeks in excitement, and
lent amazing energy and activity to her young, lithe body, would
either make a noble, daring, brilliant woman of her, or else she
would be shipwrecked on rocks the others would never come to, and
it would flame up higher and higher and consume her.

"Be careful of Judy" had been almost the last words of the anxious
mother when, in the light that comes when the world's is going out,
she had seen with terrible clearness the stones and briars in the
way of that particular pair of small, eager feet.

And she had died, and Judy was stumbling right amongst them now,
and her father could not "be careful" of her because he