His Family

He was thinking of the town he had known. Not of _old_ New York--he had heard of that from old, old men when he himself had still been young and had smiled at their garrulity. H...

Roger's hearing was extremely acute. Though the room where he was sitting, his study, was at the back of the house, he heard Deborah's key at the street door and he heard the do...

On the next evening, Saturday, while Roger ate his dinner, Laura came to sit with him. She herself was dining out. That she should have dressed so early in order to keep him com...

He breakfasted with Deborah late on Sunday morning. He had come down at the usual hour despite his long tramp of the previous night, for he wanted to tell her the news and talk...

One afternoon a few days later Roger was riding in the park. He rode "William," a large lazy cob who as he advanced in age had so subtly and insidiously slackened his pace from...

Roger soon grew accustomed to seeing young Sloane about the house. They could talk together more easily, and he began to call him Harold. Harold asked him with Laura to lunch at...

In the weeks which followed, Roger found the peace of his home so interrupted and disturbed by wedding preparations that often retreating into his den he earnestly told himself...

It was a relief to him to find how smoothly he and Deborah dropped back into their old relations. It was good to get home those evenings; for in this new stage of its existence,...

DEBORAH needed rest, he thought, for the bright attractive face of his daughter was looking rather pale of late, and the birthmark on her forehead showed a faint thin line of re...

Out of the subway they emerged into a noisy tenement street. Roger had known such streets as this, but only in the night-time, as picturesque and adventurous ways in an undergro...

"I guess I can stand it if you can," was his gruff rejoinder, "though if I ran a school like yours I think by night I'd have schooled enough. Do most principals run night school...

Roger awoke the next morning feeling sore and weary, and later in his office it was hard to keep his mind on his work. He thought of young Isadore Freedom. He was glad he had me...

Deborah's recovery was rapid and determined. The next night she was sitting up and making light of her illness. On the third day she dismissed her nurse, and when her father cam...

A few hours later Roger awakened. His lower berth was still pitch dark. The train had stopped, and he had been roused by a voice outside his window. Rough and slow and nasal, th...

On his return to the city, Roger found that Deborah's school had apparently swept all other interests out of her mind. Baird hardly ever came to the house, and she herself was s...

But that winter there was more in the house than Deborah's big family. Though at times Roger felt it surging in with its crude, immense vitality, there were other times when it...

But she did not appear to care to be helped. Nor did Allan--he rarely came to the house, and he went to Edith's not at all. He was even absent from her Christmas tree for the ch...

In Deborah's school, in the meantime, affairs had drawn to a climax. The moment had come for the city to say whether her new experiment should be dropped the following year or a...

"Yes, but can she?" Edith asked, with the engrossed expression which came on her pretty florid face whenever she neared such a topic. She spoke with evident awkwardness. "That's...

Roger had been spending a long quiet evening at home. He had asked John to dine with him and they had chatted for a time. Then John had started up to his room. And listening to...

Roger went through the next two days in a kind of a stupor. He remembered holding Edith and feeling her shudder as though from a chill. He remembered being stopped in the hall b...

But there was a rugged practical side to the character of Roger Gale, and the next morning he was ashamed of the brooding thoughts which had come in the night. He shook them off...

George met him at the station, as he had done a year before. But at once Roger noticed a difference. In the short time since his father's death certain lines had come in the boy...

It had rained so hard for the past two days that no one had gone to the village, which was nearly three miles from the farm. But when the storm was over at last, George and Eliz...

Roger saw little of Deborah in the weeks that followed. She was gathering her forces for the long struggle she saw ahead. And his own worries filled his mind. On his house he su...

Roger met her at the train at eight o'clock in the evening. The fast mountain express of the summer had been taken off some time before, so Edith had had to be up at dawn and to...

Roger found her like that one evening. He heard what he thought was a sob from the room, for she had forgotten to close the door. He came into the doorway but drew back, and clo...

After dinner that night, in the living room the two older children studied their lessons and Edith sat mending a pair of rompers for little Tad. Presently Roger came out from hi...

But later in the evening, when Allan and Deborah came in, Roger, who in the meantime had had a good hour in Japan and was somewhat relaxed and soothed, decided at once this was...

And now he felt the approach at last of another season of quiet, one of those uneventful times which come in family histories. As he washed and dressed for dinner, one night a l...

If there were any cloud upon his horizon, it was the thought of Laura. She had barely been to the house since Edith had come back to town; and at times, especially in the days w...

"Very well," her father grunted, and they went down to dinner. There Deborah was silent, and Edith did most of the talking. Edith, quite aware of the fact that Laura and all Lau...

But as he watched Laura in the house, Roger's first emotions were complicated more and more by a feeling of bewilderment. At dinner the next evening he noticed with astonishment...

But the quiet was dark to Roger now. Each night he spent in his study alone, for instinctively he felt the need of being by himself for a while, of keeping away from his childre...

There came a season of sleet and rain when the smaller children were shut indoors and it was hard to keep them amused. They did not look well, and Edith was worried. She had alw...

On the morrow Bruce did not grow better. If anything, the child grew worse. But by the next morning the crisis had passed. In the house the tension relaxed, and Roger suddenly f...

On the next day, which was Sunday, Deborah made an appointment with her father's physician, and had a long talk with him at his house. Upon her return she went to her room and s...

It was a clear beautiful afternoon toward the end of May. And as the train puffing up the grade wound along the Connecticut River, Roger sat looking out of the window. The orcha...

The next morning on his arrival in town, Roger went to his office. He had little cause for uneasiness there, for twice in the summer he had come down to keep an eye on the busin...

He turned with a startled jerk of his head and his face slowly reddened. But when he saw the maid's eager expression and saw that she was expecting a scene, with a frown of disp...

Deborah had not yet stopped work. Again and again she put it off. For in her busy office so many demands both old and new kept pressing in upon her, such unexpected questions an...

Of that greater family, one member had been in the house all through the month which had just gone by. But he had been so quiet, so carefully unobtrusive, that he had been scarc...

After John had gone away the house was very quiet. Only from the room upstairs there could be heard occasionally the faint clear cry of Deborah's child. And once again to Roger...

And his dreams were of children. Their faces passed before him. Now they were young again in the house. They were eating their suppers, three small girls, chattering like magpie...