"Oh, won't that be nice, Daddy!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed and red-cheeked in her excitement. "To be really rich!"
"Well, we shall be able to engage somebody better fitted perhaps for the position of housekeeper," sighed Mr. Day, turning to his newspaper again.
"That's all right, Daddy," she said. "But meanwhile I am going to do all I can to make things go smoother. Just as you said last night, it can only be brought about by somebody's doing something. I'll do something, you see if I don't."
She made this declaration cheerfully. But when she closed her books, kissed daddy, and went up to bed, her countenance was overcast with an expression far from cheerful.
Only the evening before she had sat here and looked her treasures over. The diary which mother had kept when she was a little girl—all the innocent little secrets she had written on the pages which Janice so delighted to read!
And the lovely miniature, with mother in the very dress she wore the evening she and Broxton Day were betrothed. Janice knew all about that. Her mother had talked freely of her courtship and of what a splendid young man daddy had appeared to be in her eyes.
Her mother's frequently expressed admiration for the young man who came from New England to win his fortune in the Middle West was doubtless the foundation of Janice Day's unusual fondness for her father.
That by her carelessness she should have brought about the loss of the treasure-box and those things which both she and daddy considered of such personal value, was the thought that weighed most heavily on the girl's heart.
Without turning on her light, she went to the window and looked out into the soft spring darkness! Daddy's letters! Mother's miniature! The treasured old diary that Janice so loved!
Her troubled little heart overflowed. She flung herself down with her face hidden in her arms folded upon the window sill, while ungovernable sobs shook her body.