rankly telling him that as his daughter was, as yet, too young to be his
companion in these matters, he would act as her locum tenens. His living
in the house and his helping as he did in Stephen's studies made
familiarity perpetual. He was just enough her senior to command her
childish obedience; and there were certain qualities in his nature which
were eminently calculated to win and keep the respect of women as well as
of men. He was the very incarnation of sincerity, and had now and again,
in certain ways, a sublime self-negation which, at times, seemed in
startling contrast to a manifestly militant nature. When at school he
had often been involved in fights which were nearly always on matters of
principle, and by a sort of unconscious chivalry he was generally found
fighting on the weaker side. Harold's father had been very proud of his
ancestry, which was Gothic through the Dutch, as the manifestly corrupted
prefix of the original name implied, and he had gathered from a constant
study of the Sagas something of the philosophy which lay behind the ideas
of the Vikings.

This new stage of Harold's life made for quicker development than any
which had gone before. Hitherto he had not the same sense of
responsibility. To obey is in itself a relief; and as it is an actual
consolation to weak natures, so it is only a retarding of the strong. Now
he had another individuality to think of. There was in his own nature a
vein of anxiety of which the subconsciousness of his own strength threw
up the outcrop.

Little Stephen with the instinct of her sex discovered before long this
weakness. For it is a weakness when any quality can be assailed or used.
The using of a man's weakness is not always coquetry; but it is something
very like it. Many a time the little girl, who looked up to and admired
the big boy who could compel her to anything when he was so minded,
would, for her own ends, work on his sense of responsibility, taking an
elfin delight in his discomfiture.

The result of Stephen's harmless little coquetries was that Harold had
occasionally either to thwart some little plan of daring, or else cover
up its results. In either case her confidence in him grew, so that
before long he became an established fact in her life, a being in whose
power and discretion and loyalty she had absolute, blind faith. And this
feeling seemed to grow with her own growth. Indeed at one time it came
to be more than an ordinar