and to show Barry Valentine that
he was welcome.

Barry was usually welcome everywhere, although not at all approved in
many cases, and criticised even by the people who liked him best. He
was a sort of fourth cousin of Mrs. Carew, who sometimes felt herself
called to the difficult task of defending him because of the distant
kinship. He was very handsome, lean, and dark, with a sleepy smile and
with eyes that all children loved; and he was clever, or, at least,
everyone believed him to be so; and he had charm--a charm of sheer
sweetness, for he never seemed to be particularly anxious to please.
Barry was very gallant, in an impersonal sort of way: he took a keen,
elder-brotherly sort of interest in every pretty girl in the village,
and liked to discuss their own love affairs with them, with a
seriousness quite paternal. He never singled any girl out for
particular attention, or escorted one unless asked, but he was
flatteringly attentive to all the middle-aged people of his
acquaintance and his big helpful hand was always ready for stumbling
old women on the church steps, or tearful waifs in the street--he
always had time to listen to other people's troubles. Barry--everyone
admitted--had his points. But after all--

After all, he was lazy, and shiftless, and unambitious: he was content
to be assistant editor of the Mail; content to be bullied and belittled
by old Rogers; content to go on his own idle, sunny way, playing with
his small, chubby son, foraging the woods with a dozen small boys at
his heels, working patiently over a broken gopher-trap or a rusty
shotgun, for some small admirer. Worst of all, Barry had been
intemperate, years ago, and there were people who believed that his
occasional visits to San Francisco, now, were merely excuses for revels
with his old newspaper friends there.

And yet, he had been such a brilliant, such a fiery and ambitious boy!
All Santa Paloma had taken pride in the fact that Barry Valentine, only
twenty, had been offered the editorship of the one newspaper of Plumas,
a little town some twelve miles away, and had prophesied a triumphant
progress for him, to the newspapers of San Francisco, of Chicago, of
New York! But Barry had not been long in Plumas when he suddenly
married Miss Hetty Scott of that town, and in the twelve years that had
passed since then the golden dreams for his future had vanished one by
one, until to-day found him with no one to believe in him--not even
h