"Did your father find time to help you?"
Bert gave her a glance and went up to his room.
He still held to his impression of martyrdom. Half undressed, he suddenly paused and got out his books, stubbornly resolved to fight his way without help. "I'll show them," he vowed, and plunged into the work. It gave him a sort of perverse satisfaction, a sorrow for himself, to think that he had to labor thus. It was long after eleven o'clock when he finished and went to bed.
That night's work gave him a sense of independence that was new and intoxicating. The winter was on in earnest, there was cold comfort in roaming the streets, and he turned to his own room as a haven. He deserted the family quarters downstairs. With the door closed the place was his castle and he was its king, even though its possessions of bed, chair, dresser, table and wall pictures were scarcely regal. Here he studied alone. The four walls took on a glamour and a personality he had never noticed before and began to reflect his moods and his humors. If he were gay, the place seemed to enclose happiness. Were he morose, the room grew gray. He reveled in its isolation and its impregnability.
From the start he had saved most of his dollar a week. The time came when he walked into the Springham Savings Bank and opened an account, duly impressed by the importance of the
