ildren."

Caleb couldn't help it.

"I told you so!" he said.

That was only a beginning. The next fortnight was filled with more new
experiences than either Caleb or his sister would have believed could
be crammed into twenty times that duration. And Caleb spent most of
his waking hours boasting to the tolerant Allison of new and quite
astonishing traits which he found in the boy.

Acting upon Dexter's suggestion the man took Steve across the very next
day and presented him to the children who were guests in the big stucco
and timber house: Little, shy, transparent-skinned Mary Graves and
Garret Devereau and Archibald Wickersham--the Right Honorable Archie.
But from the very first, Steve's lack of enthusiasm for their company
impressed itself upon Caleb. As a matter of fact, the boy did cross
over and join in their games the first day or two, but it was only
after Caleb himself had suggested it. And more often than not he would
be back again, before an hour had passed, to sit silent and moody, chin
in hand, upon the steps, gazing north at the hills. It puzzled Caleb
mightily; he laid it to homesickness at the beginning.

Toward Barbara Allison, throughout those days, Steve's bearing was that
of frank and undisguised wonder and worship. Whatever they did, no
matter what they played at, his eyes rarely left the little girl's
bobbed head. For any feat which he performed he invariably turned to
her for approbation. And in return for that worship Barbara's
treatment of him was truly feminine. He out-ran the other boys as a
deer might outrun an ox; he out-leaped them without putting himself to
an effort, but he won scant attention or visible admiration from the
dark-eyed Barbara. She was far more likely to turn from his hungry
eyes to compliment the Honorable Archie upon his clumsy performance
with a sweetness that left Steve biting his lips in lack of
understanding. More than once it made even Caleb grit his teeth--the
little girl's disdainfully tilted chin--and when Steve's reluctance to
leave his own yard became an unmistakable thing, he spoke to Sarah
about it.

"Maybe I'm prejudiced, blindly," he growled, "but I do believe that
there is nothing in the world to equal the absolute and refined cruelty
of a woman-child of ten--unless it is that of a woman of twenty or
thirty, and on up the scale--when she first finds out that a man cares
enough for her so that she can really hurt him! If that Barbara was a