wonderful success with her work, while he grew wilder and stranger, she began to pity instead of despising him. Poor backwoods boy! How could he help himself? He had been really superior to most of his cousins and friends. Seldom did he do any work at home, except with his bees. Rumor credited him with fights and brawls, and visits to the old moonshiner who distilled the liquor called white mule. His mother worried incessantly. His father passed from concern to grief. “Dog-gone me!” he ejaculated. “Edd’s headed like them Sprall boys. An’ who'd ever think it!”
Likewise, Lucy passed from pity to worry, and from that to a conscience-stricken accusation. If for no other reason she was to blame because she had come to Cedar Ridge. This fall of Edd’s was taking the sweetness out of her success. Could the teaching of a few children balance the ruin of their brother? How impossible not to accuse herself of the change in him! She felt it every time she saw him.
At last Lucy saw clearly that her duty consisted in a choice between giving up her welfare work there and winning Edd Denmeade back to what he had been before she came. Thought of abandoning that work would scarcely stay before her consciousness, yet she forced herself to think of it. She had found a congenial, uplifting vocation for herself. But it was one that she could give up, if it were right to do so. There were other things she could find to do. Coming to think of the change in the Denmeade household, the cleanliness and brightness, the elimination of unsanitary habits, the saving of labor, the development of the children’s minds, she could not persuade herself that it would be otherwise than cowardice for her to quit now.
“I must stay,” soliloquized Lucy, at last seeing clearly. “If I quit now, all my life I'd be bitter because I failed of the opportunity I prayed for. . . . Then, if I stay I must save Edd Denmeade. . . . It would be welfare work of the noblest kind. . . . What it costs me must not matter.”
Lucy deliberately made the choice, for good or ill to herself, with her eyes wide open and all her faculties alive to the
