"Billy!" called Lydia.
He turned and waited for her with a broad smile.
"Billy," she said without preliminaries, "I gave in!"
"Lydia!" he gasped.
"I couldn't stand their pleading. I gave in. I hate myself, but Dad looks ten years younger!"
"You actually mean you're letting yourself get mixed up with the
Whiskey Trust and that pup of a Dave Marshall?"
Lydia plodded doggedly through the snow. "Of course, Kent's tending to all that, I refuse to be told the details."
"Lydia!" cried Billy again and there was such a note of pain in his voice that she turned her face to his with the same dogged look in her eyes that had been expressed in her walk.
"Why," he said, "what am I going to do without you to look up to—to live up to? You can't mean it!"
"But I do mean it. I fought and fought and I have for years till I'm sick of it. Now, at least, there'll be no more poverty for Dad to complain of."