his conduct. "And this
seems to me to be as big an opportunity as I'll ever have. You--you
like the boy, don't you, so far as you have become acquainted with him?"

While he was explaining Caleb wished that his sister would look him in
the face, once at least. It was hard to know what she was thinking
when she sat like that, staring into the fire. He waited, not without
grave misgivings, for her reply.

"Yes, I like him," she assented, after a while.

"You do think that he might amount to something?" Caleb insisted.

"I feel almost sure of it," his sister admitted.

There didn't seem much ground to be gained along that tack, so Caleb
gave up trying to apologize for what he had done.

"Of course it--it comes as a surprise to you," he murmured. "It is
pretty sudden--but I don't think that either of us will ever regret it."

And then Sarah faced 'round toward her brother. Her eyes were
unaccountably wet, but there was laughter on her lips.

"A surprise--a--a somewhat sudden!" she faltered. "Why, I knew you
were going to do it that first day when you came sidling up to the
veranda behind him. I was certain of it, even then. And if you hadn't
decided to, why, I'd made up my mind that I'd do it myself, if you ever
came back from that endless fishing-trip!"

And there, as Caleb put it later to Allison, were three days of
perfectly good diplomatic preparation gone all to waste. For it was
Sarah who monopolized the conversation that evening. She ran on and
on, from one plan to another, eager, half-breathless, and more wildly
prophetic than the man had dared to be, until the realization gradually
dawned in her brother's brain that great as had been his desire to keep
the boy there in the white place on the hill, it had been dwarflike
beside her woman-hunger. It astonished him, when he mentioned the
subject of clothes, to find how far she had outstripped him in actual
deed.

"I've been rummaging through some of the old chests upstairs, too," she
caught up his suggestion. "To-day I explored for hours and found some
of the things you used to wear which look as though they hadn't been
worn at all. I laid some of them out for him to put on when he gets up
in the morning. And, Cal, who'd ever believe now that a plump behemoth
like you ever could have worn such--such dainty and cunning things!"

The inferred description should have prepared Caleb, but at the moment
he failed to remember that it was some forty