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my paycheck each month.”
    “Of course you can live with me,” the aunt said quickly. “It’s the best plan all around. Isn’t it, Gus?”
    Lucy’s father sat gobbling his food, reminding Lucy of how the ducks in Washington Park had snatched up the stale buns that she and Ted had thrown to them, and she felt a stab of pain as she realized how many times each day something would remind her of Ted.
    Gus stopped eating, his fork over his plate, and told Aunt Alice, “Lucy’s promised to go back to Swandyke. It was our agreement if she went to college.”
    “God my deliverer, Gus! You can’t expect her to go back. Not now,” the aunt said.
    “A promise’s a promise.”
    Lucy gasped. “How could I face them? How could I face anybody?”
    Gus took a bite of his eggs. He must have two or three scrambled on his plate, Lucy thought. She and Aunt Alice were frugal and ate eggs only on Sunday. “You made the promise to me. It’s not my fault what’s happened. It taken place without my knowing.”
    “But I couldn’t go back,” Lucy said.
    Gus shrugged and repeated, “It ain’t my fault.”
    “No, Papa, please,” Lucy begged.
    “The family needs your help more than ever, now that Doll’s wages’ll go to her husband. I never made her promise nothing. I can’t spare you, too.”
    “Well, you’ll have to spare her,” Aunt Alice said. “You’re asking her to let the devil take a mortgage on her. What does Margaret say about it?”
    “Oh, she don’t hold with me. She thinks I ought to let the girl go, but she’s not the one Lucy’s made the promise to.” He paused to swallow his food. “You won’t go back on your word will you, Lucy?”
    The two older people looked at the girl, who thought for a long time and finally assented, for giving your word was a solemn commitment.
    After breakfast, the women walked Gus to the trolley, and when it pulled away, Aunt Alice said, “At least he came to tell you. You have to give him that. He didn’t write. He took two days off work to tell you in person. That has to mean something.” She paused and added, “Or maybe Margaret made him do it. She couldn’t come herself, what with all the children to look after, and she didn’t want to tell you in a letter. So maybe she made him come. Whatever it was, he did come.”
    Lucy nodded, but in her heart, she knew her father had not made the trip to Denver because he was sensitive of her feelings. No, he’d come to bully her into returning to Swandyke.

    Lucy had a few suitors after she returned to Swandyke, but none to compare with Ted Turpin. She eventually married Henry Bibb, the second-level boss at the Fourth of July Mine, a man who’d once courted Dolly. He was a little older, a good person, clean in his ways, solid, as Dolly had once said about him. He had had an education, and he loved Lucy. And what did it matter if she did not care as much for him as he did her? She was not happy, but neither was she caught up in sadness. When the children came—Lucy quit her job, no longer earning a paycheck to turn over to her father—she had a good life, as good as could be expected in Swandyke, at any rate, and in time, she could go for a day without thinking about Ted. She missed him dreadfully at first, but later it was Dolly she missed, because the two never spoke now except when it couldn’t be helped. And when that happened or when it was necessary to refer to her sister, Lucy called her Helen—Dolly’s real name.
    But Lucy’s marriage came later, after she had been back in Swandyke for a while. Lucy went home the day after she graduated from college, to a job in the office of the Fourth of July Mine. She had planned to teach, but her father wanted her at the mine, and it didn’t seem to matter what job she took. Ted and Dolly had not been at the depot with the family to meet her, and she did not see them for several days. Dolly came by the house one evening after supper to loan their mother a pan—her pan,