Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/33

Rh afraid you are tired to death and won't want to keep house with me at all."

Philip protested at this:

"Not a bit of it, my dear! I am as interested as can be and want to hear all of your story. Did your daddy live much longer?"

"No, not so very long, but long enough for me to have to sell or pawn most everything in the studio."

"Why didn't your friends help you?"

"They would have, but I didn't let them know. Daddy and I always hated to be helped. I was careful not to get rid of anything that he could see. He didn't know about it, even when I rolled up rugs and dragged them off. I didn't sell any of his books. Somehow I felt that he would know about their going even if he couldn't see. It was a good thing I didn't because just the very day he died he asked me to read to him, little bits from various books. Just suppose I had sold those very books! Wouldn't it have been awful?"

Philip agreed that it would have been sad indeed.

"Mrs. O'Shea came over and 'tended to that funeral too. She found the widow's bonnet among some things Mamma forgot to take away with her and she said it would be 'propri-