, was big in his love for the tiny woman who was his wife. Other
women George did not see though he spoke to them on the street. He had
pleaded on bended knees for the love of his tiny woman and when he got
her all other women became just strange shadows. So only his wife and
Doc Philipps knew how tender a heart was his.

Green Valley housewives caught glimpses of this man's great figure
towering above the roaring forge and saw the crowd of lesser men, their
husbands, gathered about him. They went home and told each other that
George Hoskins was a big, rude brute, that he drank like a fish and
would bring the town to ruin, for he was the village president.

And while they were saying these things about George Hoskins he was
perhaps throwing out of his shop some smug traveling man who had
stepped into it to get in out of the rain and had mistakenly tried to
make himself at home there by telling a filthy yarn that sullied all
womanhood.

These then are a few of the many human attractions of Green Valley.
They are listed here to give the right sort of setting and the proper
feel to this story of Green Valley life.

CHAPTER V

CYNTHIA'S SON

So Cynthia's son came home and Green Valley took him to its heart and
loved him as it had loved his mother long ago. Everywhere he was
spoken of as Cynthia's boy and no one seemed to remember that he was
born in heathen India instead of in the old porticoed house on the
Churchill farm.

Green Valley knew that very first week, of course, that Cynthia's son
was very nearly twenty-eight years old and that his full name was John
Roger Churchill Knight. But what it did not know for some weeks was
that among other interesting things Cynthia's son was a minister, a
duly certified preacher of the gospel. It was remembered in a general
way that Cynthia's husband had been some sort of a wonderful foreign
missionary or something; but a man who was Joshua Churchill's only
grandchild and heir needed no other ancestor. So Green Valley was
astounded one Sunday morning, when the Reverend Campbell was
unexpectedly ill, and the Reverend Courtney off somewhere answering a
new call, and Green Valley without a pastor, to have Cynthia's boy
quietly offer to take charge of the services.

If Green Valley was astounded to hear that Cynthia's son was a minister
it was too awed to speak in anything but an amazed whisper of that
first sermon that the tall young man from India talked off so