ingly been the country gentleman. Flowers had
been his hobby; so that now he could have had no work which would have
more suited him than this guardianship of the roses. For himself he
desired no better thing than to spend what remained of his life in this
sunlit privacy and communion with growing things.

He gripped Larry's hand when they were first alone in the little
cottage. "Thanks, Larry; I'll not forget this," he said. He said little
else. He did not refer to his prison life, or what had gone before it.
He had never asked Larry, even while in prison together, about Larry's
previous activities and associates; and he asked no questions now.
Apparently it was the desire of this silent man to have the bones of his
own past remain buried, and to leave undisturbed the graves of others'
mistakes.

A retiring, unobtrusive figure, he settled quickly to his work. He
seemed content, even happy; and at times there was a far-away, exultant
look in his gray eyes. Miss Sherwood caught this on several occasions;
it puzzled her, and she spoke of it to Larry. Larry understood what lay
behind Joe's bearing, and since the thing had never been told to him as
a secret he retold that portion of Joe's history he had recited to the
Duchess: of a child who had been brought up among honorable people,
protected from the knowledge that her father was a convict--a child Joe
never expected to see and did not even know how to find.

Joe Ellison became a figure that moved Miss Sherwood deeply: content to
busy himself in his earthly obscurity, ever dreaming and gloating over
his one great sustaining thought--that he had given his child the best
chance which circumstances permitted; that he had removed himself from
his child's life; that some unknown where out in the world his child
was growing to maturity among clean, wholesome people; that he never
expected to make himself known to his child. The situation also moved
Larry profoundly whenever he looked at his old friend, merging into a
kindly fellowship with the earth.

But while busy with new affairs at Cedar Crest, Larry was all the while
thinking of Maggie, and particularly of his own dilemma regarding Maggie
and Dick. But the right plan still refused to take form in his brain.
However, one important detail occurred to him which required immediate
attention. If his procedure in regard to Hunt's pictures succeeded in
drawing the painter from his hermitage, nothing was more likely than
that