, too! And
they were Stacy's very words!

"Besides," added Mrs. Barker audaciously, "he could get rid of it
elsewhere. He had another offer, but he thought yours the best. So don't
be silly."

By this time they had reached their rooms. Barker, apparently dismissing
the subject from his mind with characteristic buoyancy, turned into the
bedroom and walked smilingly towards a small crib which stood in the
corner. "Why, he's gone!" he said in some dismay.

"Well," said Mrs. Barker a little impatiently, "you didn't expect me to
take him into the public parlor, where I was seeing visitors, did you?
I sent him out with the nurse into the lower hall to play with the other
children."

A shade momentarily passed over Barker's face. He always looked forward
to meeting the child when he came back. He had a belief, based on no
grounds whatever, that the little creature understood him. And he had a
father's doubt of the wholesomeness of other people's children who
were born into the world indiscriminately and not under the exceptional
conditions of his own. "I'll go and fetch him," he said.

"You haven't told me anything about your interview; what you did and
what your good friend Stacy said," said Mrs. Barker, dropping languidly
into a chair. "And really if you are simply running away again after
that child, I might just as well have asked Captain Heath to stay
longer."

"Oh, as to Stacy," said Barker, dropping beside her and taking her hand;
"well, dear, he was awfully busy, you know, and shut up in the innermost
office like the agate in one of the Japanese nests of boxes. But," he
continued, brightening up, "just the same dear old Jim Stacy of Heavy
Tree Hill, when I first knew you. Lord! dear, how it all came back to
me! That day I proposed to you in the belief that I was unexpectedly
rich and even bought a claim for the boys on the strength of it, and how
I came back to them to find that they had made a big strike on the very
claim. Lord! I remember how I was so afraid to tell them about you--and
how they guessed it--that dear old Stacy one of the first."

"Yes," said Mrs. Barker, "and I hope your friend Stacy remembered that
but for ME, when you found out that you were not rich, you'd have given
up the claim, but that I really deceived my own father to make you keep
it. I've often worried over that, George," she said pensively, turning
a diamond bracelet around her pretty wrist, "although I never said
anything about i