Victor Ollnee's Discipline. Garland Hamlin
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"No, I mean The Voices advise her."
"Why should 'they' know anything about business?"
She became evasive. "They do! They've proved it again and again. Mrs. Joyce's income has doubled in five years by following father's advice."
He pondered on this deeply. "I don't like that. I don't see why you or your Voices should be valuable in that way."
"There are many things in this world for you to learn, my son," she replied with an assumption of superior wisdom.
This nettled him. "It don't take much wisdom to know that if you go on advising people in that way you'll get into trouble. That's what that writer said in the paper."
She closed her lips tightly as if to keep back a cutting reply, and he rose briskly. "Well, see here, we must put away these dishes."
She acquiesced in his postponement of the discussion, and helped him wash the dishes and set the room to rights. At last she said: "Where is the morning Star? Have you seen it?"
"There's a paper at the foot of the stairs; is that yours?"
"Yes," she replied.
"I'll get it," he said, and was out of the door and back again before she fully realized that he was gone. He opened the twist of damp paper with haste, fully expecting to find some new attack on "Mrs. Ollnee, the Blood-sucker," but there was nothing. "All the same, you're not safe in this house," he said. "They threatened to arrest you, and I don't like to leave you here alone to-day."
"You need not worry about me," she replied, quietly. "Father will take care of me. If he saw any real danger coming my way he would warn me of it."
"He didn't warn you of the coming of the reporter, did he?"
"No—he had some reason for permitting this cloud to come upon me. He knows best."
"I don't believe I'd put very much faith in 'guides' that didn't keep me out of trouble."
"Perhaps all this is a part of our discipline. They are wiser than we. I accept even this disgrace as a good in disguise. Perhaps it was all intended to bring you to me."
The youth sank back again baffled by this all-inclosing acceptance. "What do you intend to do to-day?" he asked, as she rose and walked over to the little walnut table.
"I am going to ask for advice."
"Now?"
"Yes; and I wish you would sit with me for a few moments and see if we cannot secure direction for the day."
He was beginning to be curious—and his desire to dig deeper into his mother's brain overcame part of his repugnance.
"All right," he boyishly answered, but his heart contracted with sudden fear of finding her false. "Let's see what they're up to."
"Take a seat opposite me," she said, and there was something commanding in her voice.
Drawing a chair up to the old brown table—which he remembered as one of the pieces of furniture in his earliest childhood home—he took a seat.
"Why do you keep this rickety old thing?" he asked, shaking it viciously.
"It was your grandfather's reading-table, and he likes me to keep it. Besides, it is highly magnetized and very sensitive."
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