ably to her secret.

"You like it here? Duncan has made himself agreeable?"

"It is a beautiful country, though a little lonesome after--after Albany.
I miss my friends, of course. But Duncan's sister has done her best, and I
have been able to get along."

The engine bell clanged and they stood side by side as the train pulled
slowly away from the platform. Langford solemnly waved a farewell to it.

"This is the moment for which I have been looking for months," he said,
with what, it seemed to Sheila, was almost a sigh of relief. He turned to
her with a smile. "I will look after the baggage," he said, and leaving
her he approached the station agent and together they examined the trunks
which had come out of the baggage car.

Sheila watched him while he engaged in this task. His face seemed a trifle
drawn; he had aged much during the month that she had been separated from
him. The lines of his face had grown deeper; he seemed, now that she saw
him at a distance, to be care-worn--tired. She had heard people call him a
hard man; she knew that business associates had complained of what they
were pleased to call his "sharp methods"; it had even been hinted that his
"methods" were irregular.

It made no difference to her, however, what people thought of him, or what
they said of him, he had been a kind and indulgent parent to her and she
supposed that in business it was everybody's business to look sharply
after their own interests. For there were jealous people everywhere; envy
stalks rampant through the world; failure cavils at mediocrity, mediocrity
sneers at genius. And Sheila had always considered her father a genius,
and the carping of those over whom her father had ridden roughshod had
always sounded in her ears like tributes.

As quite unconsciously we are prone to place the interests of self above
considerations for the comfort and the convenience of others, so Sheila
had grown to judge her father through the medium of his treatment of her.
Her own father--who had died during her infancy--could not have treated
her better than had Langford. Since her mother's death some years before,
Langford had been both father and mother to her, and her affection for him
had flourished in the sunshine of his. No matter what other people
thought, she was satisfied with him.

As a matter of fact David Dowd Langford allowed no one--not even
Sheila--to look into his soul. What emotions slumbered beneath the mask of
his habitua