frilled shirt-bosoms.

"It is absurd that he should have been born in America and in these
days," a brilliant person had declared. "He always brings to my mind the
portraits in delightful old annuals, 'So-and-so--at twenty-five.'"

His supple ease of movement and graceful length of limb gave him an air of
youth. He was one of the creatures to whom the passage of years would mean
but little, but added charm and adaptability. His eyes were singularly
living things--the eyes that almost unconsciously entreat and whose
entreaty touches one; the fine, irregular outline of his profile was the
absolute expression of the emotional at war with itself, the passionate,
the tender, the sensitive, and complex. The effect of these things was
almost the effect of peculiar physical beauty, and with this he combined
the allurements of a compelling voice and an enviable sense of the fitness
of things. He never lost a thought through the inability to utter it. When
he had left college, he had left burdened with honours and had borne with
him the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow-students. He had earned and
worn his laurels with an ease and grace which would be remembered through
years to come.

"It's something," it was once said, "to have known a fellow to whom
things came so easily."

When he had entered the ministry, there had been some wonder expressed
among the men who had known him best, but when he preached his first
sermon at Willowfield, where there was a very desirable church indeed,
with whose minister Mrs. Stornaway had become dissatisfied, and who in
consequence was to be civilly removed, the golden apple fell at once into
his hand.

Before he had arrived he had been spoken of rather slightingly as "the
young man," but when he rose in the pulpit on the eventful Sunday
morning, such a thrill ran through the congregation as had not stirred it
at its devotions for many a summer day. Mrs. Stornaway mentally decided
for him upon the spot.

"He is of one of our oldest families," she said. "This is what
Willowfield wants."

He dined with the Stornaways that day, and when he entered the parlour
the first figure his eyes fell upon was that of Agnes Stornaway, dressed
in white muslin, with white roses in her belt. She was a tall girl, with
a willowy figure and a colourless fairness of skin, but when her mother
called her to her side and Baird touched her hand, she blushed in such a
manner that Mrs. Stornaway was a little ast