, was another story, one that Mrs. Toland never tired of
telling. Little Jim had his place in their hearts from their wedding
day. Barbara was eleven years old when, with passionate grief, she
learned that he was not her half brother, and many casual friends did
not know it to this day. Jim, to the doctor's delight, chose to follow
the profession of his foster father, and had stumbled, with not too much
application, through medical college. Now he was to go to New York for
hospital work, and then to Berlin for a year's real grind, and until the
Eastern hospital should open classes, was back in his old enormous
third-floor bedroom upstairs, enjoying a brief season of idleness and
petting, the handsome, unaffected, sunshiny big brother of Mrs. Toland's
fondest dreams.

"And he can hardly keep his eyes off Babbie," the mother confided to her
sister-in-law.

Miss Toland gave her a shrewd glance.

"For heaven's sake don't get that notion in your head, Sally! Babbie may
be ready to make a little fool of herself, but if ever I saw a man who
_isn't_ in love, it's Jim!" said Miss Toland, who was a thin, gray-haired,
well-dressed woman of forty, with a curious magnetism quite her own.
Miss Toland had lived in France for the ten years before thirty, and had
a Frenchwoman's reposeful yet alert manner, and a Frenchwoman's art in
dressing. After many idle years, she had suddenly become deeply
interested in settlement work, had built a little settlement house, "The
Alexander Toland Neighbourhood House," in one of the factory districts
south of San Francisco, and was in a continual state of agitation and
upset because worthy settlement workers were at that time almost an
unknown quantity in California. Just at present she was availing herself
of her brother's hospitality because she had no assistant at all at the
"Alexander," and was afraid to stay in its very unsavoury environment
alone. She loved Barbara dearly, but she was usually perverse with her
sister-in-law.

"You may say what you like about notions in my head," Mrs. Toland
answered with a wise little nod. "But the dear girl is _radiant_ every
time she looks at him, and both Dad and I think we notice a new
_protective_ quality in Jim--"

"Did Robert say so?" Miss Toland asked dryly. To this Mrs. Toland
answered with a merry laugh and a little squeeze of her sister-in-law's
arm.

"Oh, you old Sanna!" she chided. "You won't believe that there's a
blessed time when Nature