ce, she knew nothing. Her sweet and spontaneous nature,
which gave its love and sympathy so readily, was almost a bar to
education: it blinded the eyes that would have otherwise seen any defect
that wanted altering, any evil trait that needed repression, any lagging
virtue that required encouragement--or the spur.

CHAPTER III--HAROLD

Squire Norman had a clerical friend whose rectory of Carstone lay some
thirty miles from Normanstand. Thirty miles is not a great distance for
railway travel; but it is a long drive. The days had not come, nor were
they ever likely to come, for the making of a railway between the two
places. For a good many years the two men had met in renewal of their
old University days. Squire Norman and Dr. An Wolf had been chums at
Trinity, Cambridge, and the boyish friendship had ripened and lasted.
When Harold An Wolf had put in his novitiate in a teeming Midland
manufacturing town, it was Norman's influence which obtained the
rectorship for his friend. It was not often that they could meet, for An
Wolf's work, which, though not very exacting, had to be done
single-handed, kept him to his post. Besides, he was a good scholar and
eked out a small income by preparing a few pupils for public school. An
occasional mid-week visit to Normanstand in the slack time of school work
on the Doctor's part, and now and again a drive by Norman over to the
rectory, returning the next day, had been for a good many years the
measure of their meeting. Then An Wolf's marriage and the birth of a son
had kept him closer to home. Mrs. An Wolf had been killed in a railway
accident a couple of years after her only child had been born; and at the
time Norman had gone over to render any assistance in his power to the
afflicted man, and to give him what was under the circumstances his best
gift, sympathy. After an interval of a few years the Squire's courtship
and marriage, at which his old friend had assisted, had confined his
activities to a narrower circle. The last time they had met was when An
Wolf had come over to Norcester to aid in the burial of his friend's
wife. In the process of years, however, the shadow over Norman's life
had begun to soften; when his baby had grown to be something of a
companion, they met again. Norman, 'who had never since his wife's death
been able to tear himself, even for a night, away from Normanstand and
Stephen, wrote to his old friend asking him to come to him. An