hrough the woods.

He was not sauntering in a seemingly aimless manner, as he usually did.
He was walking straight for her, as if she were something he had been
aiming for for hours. And he did not drop at her feet negligently on
the steps, as he usually did, and call her some fanciful name like
"Queen of the Woodlands," or "Lady Marjorie." He sat erectly on a
chair across from her, and Marjorie bethought herself that he was very
much like a curate making a call. The kindly expression was always on
his face, even when he was most deeply in earnest, and he was
apparently in earnest to-day.

"I stopped the other men from coming," began Pennington with no
preface. "I wanted to have a long talk with you. I want to tell you a
story."

"I wish you would," she said, though she had had so many scenes of late
that, without any idea what was coming, a little tremor of terror crept
around her heart. She leaned back in her rustic rocker, there on the
veranda, and looked at him in her innocent, friendly fashion. He
paused a little before he began.

"Once upon a time," he began abruptly, "there was a man who had a very
fair start in life. His people saw to it that everything was smooth
for him--too smooth, perhaps. He didn't realize that he could ever be
in a position where they wouldn't be able to straighten things out for
him. He was a decent enough chap; weak, perhaps, but kind, at least.
He went to school and college, and finally took orders, and was given a
living in a county near where his people lived. Life went along easily
enough for him, and perhaps a bit stupidly. Too stupidly. He got
bored by it. So after a while he gambled. He played the stock-market.
Presently he used some money that was not his--that had been intrusted
to him by another. He lost that. So he had to give up
everything--home, friends, profession, country--and go and live in a
strange country. His people, good always, straightened things out for
him, at a great sacrifice; but they made it a condition that he should
stay where he was. Time went on, and things were forgotten. And the
people who had made him promise not to return died. They left him, in
dying, some money. Not a great deal, but enough to keep him
comfortably. And he didn't know what to do. He was happy, for the
first time in his life, with a little friend he had found, some one
almost like a daughter, some one who seemed, in humble ways, to need
him to help her in