VII.
The morning was well over when Minnie May came running into the store to ask Dorinda to come to her mother.
"The doctor is with her," said the child, "and he wants to leave some directions."
"Hadn't your father better see him?" Dorinda inquired, longing yet hesitating.
"No, you go," answered Nathan before the child could reply. "You're so much quicker at understanding," he explained, "and you can tell me what he says after he's gone."
He looked, for all his immense frame, more bent and colourless and ineffectual, she thought, than she had ever seen him. What a mean life he had had! And he was good. There wasn't a better husband and father in the world than Nathan Pedlar, and for the matter of that, there wasn't a more honest tradesman. Yet everybody, even his own children, pushed
