n. "That was a wren's
nest. They have all gone now. They will not come any more."

Still further they plodded, he unfolding the simple facts of life,
she wondering with the wide wonder of a child. When they had gone a
block or two he turned slowly about as if the end of the world had
been reached.

"We must be going back!" he said.

And so she had come to her fifth year, growing in sweetness,
intelligence, and vivacity. Gerhardt was fascinated by the questions
she asked, the puzzles she pronounced. "Such a girl!" he would exclaim
to his wife. "What is it she doesn't want to know? 'Where is God? What
does He do? Where does He keep His feet?" she asks me. "I gotta laugh
sometimes." From rising in the morning, to dress her to laying her
down at night after she had said her prayers, she came to be the chief
solace and comfort of his days. Without Vesta, Gerhardt would have
found his life hard indeed to bear.

CHAPTER XXVII

For three years now Lester had been happy in the companionship of
Jennie. Irregular as the connection might be in the eyes of the church
and of society, it had brought him peace and comfort, and he was
perfectly satisfied with the outcome of the experiment. His interest
in the social affairs of Cincinnati was now practically nil, and he
had consistently refused to consider any matrimonial proposition which
had himself as the object. He looked on his father's business
organization as offering a real chance for himself if he could get
control of it; but he saw no way of doing so. Robert's interests were
always in the way, and, if anything, the two brothers were farther
apart than ever in their ideas and aims. Lester had thought once or
twice of entering some other line of business or of allying himself
with another carriage company, but he did not feel that ha could
conscientiously do this. Lester had his salary--fifteen thousand
a year as secretary and treasurer of the company (his brother was
vice-president)--and about five thousand from some outside
investments. He had not been so lucky or so shrewd in speculation as
Robert had been; aside from the principal which yielded his five
thousand, he had nothing. Robert, on the other hand, was
unquestionably worth between three and four hundred thousand dollars,
in addition to his future interest in the business, which both
brothers shrewdly suspected would be divided somewhat in their favor.
Robert and Lester would get a fourth each, they thoug