manner on a family tree
having its roots in the turf rather than clinging to Plymouth Rock.
Isaac Sutherland, her father, had been knowing in horse-flesh, and would
have looked askance on the Reverend Orme Leighton as a suitor had he not
also been knowing in men. The truth was that in Leighton the man was
bigger than the parson, and to the conceded fact that all the world
loves a lover he added the prestige of the less-bandied truth that all
the world loves a fighter. He, also, knew horse-flesh. He finally won
Ann's father over on the day when Ike Sutherland learned to his cost
that the Reverend Orme could discern through the back of his head that
distension of the capsular ligament of the hock commonly termed a bog
spavin.

Ann did not share her husband's extreme views. It was a personal loyalty
that had brought her uncomplaining to a far country, unbuoyed by the
Reverend Orme's dreams of a new state, but seeking with an inward
fervidness some scene of lasting peace wherewith to blot out the memory
of long years of turmoil and wholesale bereavement.

To her those first years in Consolation Cottage were long--long with the
weight of six thousand miles from home. Then, with the suddeness of
answered prayer, a light came into her darkness. He was named Shenton.
Mammy's broad, homesick face broke into an undying smile. "Sho is mo'
lak ole times, Mis' Ann, havin' a young Marster abeout." And when, two
years later, on a Christmas day, Natalie was born, Mammy mixed smiles
with tears and sobbed, "Oh, Mis' Ann, sho is mo' an' _mo'_ lak ole
times."

She, too, had her clinging memories of halls, now empty, that echoed
once to the cries and gurgling laughter of a race in full flower.

As Ann sat one evening on the embowered veranda looking away to the
north, a child within the circle of each arm, the old aching in her
breast was stilled. The restless Leighton paused in his stride to gaze
through fiery, but gloomy, eyes upon his fair-haired baby daughter and
his son, pale, crowned with dark curls, and cried, with a toss of his
own dark mane: "As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, so are
children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of
them!"

This realization of the preciousness of children in adversity paved the
way for the reception of one who was to come to them from under the
shadow of a family cloud, a certain mysterious personage of tender
years, Lewis Leighton, by name.

For weeks the name o