own ignorance of
many branches of knowledge.

A man in this receptive mood is not asked as a rule to wait long for
the needful response; but Brendon was old-fashioned and the women
born of the war attracted him not at all. He recognized their fine
qualities and often their distinction of mind; yet his ideal struck
backward to another and earlier type--the type of his own mother
who, as a widow, had kept house for him until her death. She was his
feminine ideal--restful, sympathetic, trustworthy--one who always
made his interests hers, one who concentrated upon his life rather
than her own and found in his progress and triumphs the salt of her
own existence.

Mark wanted, in truth, somebody who would be content to merge
herself in him and seek neither to impress her own personality upon
his, nor develop an independent environment. He had wit to know a
mother's standpoint must be vastly different from that of any wife,
no matter how perfect her devotion; he had experience enough of
married men to doubt whether the woman he sought was to be found in
a post-war world; yet he preserved and permitted himself a hope that
the old-fashioned women still existed, and he began to consider
where he might find such a helpmate.

He was somewhat overweary after a strenuous year; but to Dartmoor
he always came for health and rest when opportunity offered, and
now he had returned for the third time to the Duchy Hotel at
Princetown--there to renew old friendships and amuse himself on the
surrounding trout streams through the long days of June and July.

Brendon enjoyed the interest he awakened among other fishermen and,
though he always went upon his expeditions alone, usually joined the
throng in the smoking-room after dinner. Being a good talker he
never failed of an audience there. But better still he liked an hour
sometimes with the prison warders. For the convict prison that
dominated that grey smudge in the heart of the moors known as
Princetown held many interesting and famous criminals, more than one
of whom had been "put through" by him, and had to thank Brendon's
personal industry and daring for penal servitude. Upon the prison
staff were not a few men of intelligence and wide experience who
could tell the detective much germane to his work. The psychology of
crime never paled in its intense attraction for Brendon and many a
strange incident, or obscure convict speech, related without comment
to him by those who had witnes