y in order to gratify
her vanity and insensate instinct for conquest."

Gillian shook her head.

"No, you're wrong. You _won't_ understand! It's all that went
before--her parents' mistakes--that should be blamed for half she's
done. I think you're very merciless, Dan."

"Perhaps I am--in this case. Frankly, if I could lessen her punishment
by lifting my little finger--I wouldn't do it."

Yet this same man when, as often happened, he took Gillian and Coppertop
for a run into the country in his car, was as simple and considerate
and kindly as a man could be. Coppertop adored him, and, as Gillian
reflected, the love of children is rarely misplaced. Some instinct leads
them to divine unfailingly which is gold and which dross.

The car was a recent acquisition. As Storran himself expressed it,
rather bitterly: "Now that I can't buy a ha'p'orth of happiness with the
money, my luck has turned." He explained to Gillian that after he
had left England he had sold his farm in Devonshire, and that a
lucky investment of the capital thus realised had turned him into a
comparatively rich man.

"Even when I was making ducks and drakes of my life generally, I didn't
seem to make a mistake over money matters. If I played cards, I won; if
I backed a horse, he romped in first; it I bought shares, they jumped up
immediately."

"What a pity!" replied Gillian ingenuously. "If only your financial
affairs hadn't prospered, you'd have had to settle down and
_work_--instead of--of----"

"Playing the fool," he supplemented. "No, I don't suppose I should.
I hadn't learned--then--that work is the only panacea, the one big
remedy."

"And now?"

"I've learned a lot of things in the last two years," quietly. "And I'm
still learning."

As the months went on, Dan's friendship began to mean a good deal
to Gillian. It had come into her life just at a time when she was
intolerably lonely, and quite unconsciously she was learning to turn to
him for advice on all the large and small affairs of daily life as they
came cropping up.

She was infinitely glad of his counsel with regard to Coppertop, who was
growing to the age when the want of a father--of a man's broad outlook
and a man's restraining hand--became an acute lack in a boy's life. And
to Gillian, who had gallantly faced the world alone since the day
when death had abruptly ended her "year of utter happiness," it was
inexpressibly sweet to be once more shielded and helped in all the
b