ess, the straightforward unworldliness which was still
level-headed and observing, the broad kindliness and belief in humanity
which were so far from unintelligent or injudicious, were more attractive
to him than any collected characteristics he had met before. They seemed
to meet some strained needs in him. To leave his own rooms, and find his
way to the house whose atmosphere was of such curious, homely brightness,
to be greeted by Sheba's welcoming eyes, to sit and chat with Tom in the
twilight or to saunter out with him with an arm through his, were things
he soon began to look forward to. He began also to realise that this life
of home and the affections was a thing he had lived without. During his
brief and wholly unemotional married life he had known nothing like it.
His years of widowerhood had been presided over by Mrs. Stornaway, who
had assumed the supervision of his child as a duty. Annie had been a
properly behaved, rather uninteresting and unresponsive little person.
She had neat features and a realisation of the importance of
respectability and the proprieties which was a credit to Willowfield and
her training. She was never gay or inconsequent or young. She had gone to
school, she had had her frocks lengthened and been introduced at
tea-parties, exactly as had been planned for her. She never committed a
breach of discretion and she never formed in any degree an element of
special interest. She greatly respected her father's position as a
successful man, and left it to be vaguely due to the approbation of
Willowfield.

Big Tom De Willoughby, in two wooden rooms behind a cross-roads store, in
a small frame house kept in order by a negro woman, and in the genteel
poverty of Miss Burford's second floor, had surrounded himself with the
comforts and pleasures of the affections. It was not possible to enter
the place without feeling their warmth, and Baird found himself nourished
by it. He saw that Rupert, too, was nourished by it. His young good looks
and manhood were developing under its influence day by day. He seemed to
grow taller and stronger. Baird had made friends with him, too, and was
with them the night he came in to announce that at last he had got work
to do.

"It is to sell things from behind a counter," he said, and he went to
Sheba and lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it before them all. "We
know a better man who has done it."

"You know a bigger man who has done it," said Tom. "He did it