father, and if he's handled properly he may yet make the kind of man I want
him to be. Only--Philip doesn't know how to handle him."

The last two years of her life she had spent on a couch, a confirmed
invalid, and oppressed by a foreboding as to Tony's ultimate future. And
then, one day, shortly before the weak flame of her life flickered out into
the darkness, she had sent for Ann, and solemnly, appealingly, confided the
boy to her care.

"I hate leaving him, Ann," she had said between the long bouts of coughing
which shook her thin frame so that speech was at times impossible. "He's
so--alone. Philip represents nothing to him but an autocrat he is bound to
obey. And Tony resents it. Any one who loves him can steady him--but no one
will ever drive him. When I'm gone, will you do what you can for him--for
him and for me?"

And Ann, holding the sick woman's feverish hands in her own cool ones, had
promised.

"I will do all that I can," she said steadily.

"And if he _does_ get into difficulties?" persisted Virginia, her eager
eyes searching the girl's face.

Ann smiled down at her reassuringly.

"Don't worry," she had answered. "If he does, why, then I'll get him out of
them if it's in any way possible."

Two days later, Ann had stood beside the bed where Virginia lay, straight