iends busied themselves with a consideration of Jim's bookcase,
reading-table, and toolchest combined, all made out of one goods box with
sundry trimmings.

Jim said nothing when he had finished, grateful that no painful silence on
the part of the other two men forced him to words until he was ready to
speak.

"Listen to me," he said at length. "I need your help now. When I came West
life didn't seem worth living at first, but I had it on my hands and
couldn't throw it away. I tried to take an interest in Asher Aydelot's
home. But it is a second-rate kind of pleasure to sit by your own lonely
fireside and enjoy the thought of the comfort another man has in his home
with the wife of his choice."

A shadow fell on Dr. Carey's face as he sat looking through the open
window at the stretch of green clover down the valley.

"I was about ready to call time on myself one winter here when Carey
brought me a letter. It was from Alice Leigh, my brother Tank's wife. Tank
and I were related--by marriage. We had the same father, but not the same
mother. My mother died the day I was born. Nobody else is so helpless as a
man with a one-day-old baby. My father was fairly forced into a second
marriage by my step-mother, Betsy Tank. She was the housekeeper at the
tavern after my mother's death. Her god was property and Tank is just like
her. She married the old Shirley House. It looked big to her. Oh, well! I
needn't repeat a common family history. I never had a mother, nor a wife,
nor a sister, nor a brother. Even my father was early prejudiced in Tank's
interest against mine, always. The one happy memory of my boyhood years
was the loving interest of Asher Aydelot's mother, who made the old
Aydelot farmhouse on the National road a welcome spot to me. For the Lord
made me with a foolish longing for a home and all of these things--father,
mother, sister, and brother."

"So you have been father and mother, brother and sister to this whole
settlement," Pryor Gaines said.

"Which may be vastly satisfying to these relatives, but does not always
fill the lack in one's own life," Horace Carey added, as a man who might
know whereof he spoke.

"I won't bore you with details," Jim began again. "The letter I had from
Alice Leigh, Tank's wife, a dozen or more years ago, asked me if I would
take the guardianship of her children if they should need a guardian. I
knew they would need one, if she were--taken from earth, as she had reason
to fear