“I am glad we met you, Larry,” said the girl. “Flo thanked you the night you came to Cedar, and I wanted to, but, while you know why I couldn’t, I would not like you to think it was very unkind of me. Whatever my father does is right, you see.”
“Of course,” said Grant gravely. “You have to believe it, Hetty.”
Hetty’s eyes twinkled. “That was very nice of you. Then you must be wrong.”
“Well,” said Grant, with a merry laugh, “it is quite likely that I am now and then. One can only do the best he can, and to be right all the time is a little too much to expect from any man.”
Miss Schuyler, who was talking to Breckenridge, turned and smiled, and Hetty said, “Then, that makes it a little easier for me to admit that the folks I belong to go just a little too far occasionally. Larry, I hate to think of the little children going hungry. Are there many of them?”
Grant’s face darkened for a moment. “I’m afraid there are quite a few—and sick ones, too, lying with about half enough to cover them in sod-hovels.”
Hetty shuddered and her eyes grew pitiful, for since the grim early days hunger and want had been unknown in the cattle country. “If I want to do something for them it can’t be very wrong,” she said. “Larry, you will take a roll of bills from me, and buy them whatever will make it a little less hard for them?”
“No,” said Grant quietly, “I can’t, Hetty. Your father gives you that money, and we have our own relief machinery.”
The girl laid her hand upon his arm appealingly. “I have a little my mother left me, and it was hers before she married my father. Can’t you understand? I am with my father, and would not lift my finger to help you and the homestead-boys against him, but it couldn’t do anybody any harm if I sent a few things to hungry children. You have just got to take those dollars, Larry.”
“Then I dare not refuse,” said Grant, after thinking a moment. “They need more than we can give them. But you can’t send me the dollars.”