the hat-stand as he passed
through the hall.

He was incurably disorderly, and only the strenuous efforts of his
daughter Joan kept the habit within bounds. Since the death of her
mother, nearly ten years ago, she had striven to fill her place and to
be to this lovable, grown-up boy who was her father all that his adored
young wife had been. And so far as material matters were concerned,
she had succeeded. She it was who usually found the MS. of his sermon
when, just as the bells were calling to service, he would come leaping
up the stairs, three at a time, to inform her tragically that it was
lost; she who saw to it that his meals were not forgotten in the
exigencies of his parish work, and who supervised his outward man to
the last detail--otherwise, in one of his frequent fits of
absent-mindedness, he would have been quite capable of presenting
himself at church in the identical grey tweeds he was now wearing.

Yet notwithstanding the irrepressible note of youth about him, which
called forth a species of "mothering" from every woman of his
acquaintance, Alan Stair was a man to whom people instinctively turned
for counsel. A child in the material things of this world, he was a
giant in spiritual development--broad-minded and tolerant, his religion
spiced with a sense of humour and deepened by a sympathetic
understanding of frail human nature. And it was to him that Ralph
Quentin, when on his death-bed, had confided the care of his motherless
little daughter, Diana, appointing him her sole guardian and trustee.

The two men had been friends from boyhood, and perhaps no one had
better understood than Ralph, who had earlier suffered a similar loss,
the terrible blank which the death of his wife had occasioned in
Stair's life. The fellowship of suffering had drawn the two men
together in a way that nothing else could have done, so that when
Quentin made known his final wishes concerning his daughter, Alan Stair
had gladly accepted the charge laid upon him, and Diana, then a child
of ten, had made her permanent home at Crailing Rectory, speedily
coming to look upon her guardian as a beloved elder brother, and upon
his daughter, who was but two years her senior, as her greatest friend.

From the point of view of the Stairs themselves, the arrangement was
not without its material advantages. Diana had inherited three hundred
a year of her own, and the sum she contributed to "cover the cost of
her upkeep," as she l