"But I can see it," I protested. "I can see it right now!"
It was so hard to see things going wrong, and not to be able to help!
It was about this time that my mother and I did a great many lessons together, and she would offer me odd bits of useful information at unexpected moments.
"Rhoda is not very well grounded," she told my father, "but I do think, Robert, that she knows a great deal for a child of ten."
She was darning stockings as she spoke, and she turned over a very ragged one of Dick's with a little sigh.
"I would like her to go to school. Not to the public school, but to a young ladies' seminary as I did. Don't you think, Robert, if I were to do without a new winter coat, and we made the old carpet on the stairs last a little longer, that we might send Rhoda to Mrs. Garfield's?"
Her face was brightening as she thought it out.
"And there's the money in her bank," she cried, "her gold pieces that dad has given her on her birthdays and on Christmas. I don't suppose, Robert, you'd want dad to pay for it all? He would, willingly."
"No," my father answered.
My mother's face fell, and then lit up again.