the carriage that awaited the party bore him away from the
noise and smell of the station by the railroad. His untried senses had
been taxed to the uttermost since leaving The Forge. His eyes ached;
his ears throbbed. Every new odour was an added torture, and his body
quivered at every touch. Sleep came to him early, however, and the
small, quiet room of the Markham house which had been allotted to him
was like a sacred holy of holies to the overstrained nerves. Sandy
slept like the dead all that first night, but habit still swayed him,
and at five o'clock he wakened suddenly and heard the stir of life out
of doors. Some one was calling a dog--his dog! It was Miss Matilda,
and Sandy smiled as he listened to her reasoning with Bob as was her
custom. Slowly the rested nerves asserted dominion over the boy, but
he did not move. He was back, in longing, among the old Lost Hollow
scenes. He was too weak to adjust himself into a new environment;
changes had worn out his ambition and hope. Miserably he turned upon
his pillow and with a sinking of the soul yearned to take his faithful
Bob with him and go back to that life which demanded no more of him
than he was able to give.

But that very afternoon his future became so involved with that of
another, whom he had never seen, that to turn back would have been an
impossibility. He and Bob were walking over a stretch of soft, hilly
land toward the autumn-tinted woods beyond, when young Lansing
Hertford, the son of Levi Markham's dead sister, arrived for a
consultation with his uncle. All his life Markham had hungered for
something that had never been his--something peculiarly his own! His
hard and struggling younger years had denied any personal luxury. He
had worked his way up; supported his old father and mother and two
sisters; had grimly set his face away from love and marriage, and then
when wealth and opportunity came to him the desire was past. But with
rigid determination he looked in other directions for compensation. At
first it was his younger sister, Caroline. Like so many self-made men,
the fine, dainty things of life attracted him. He had dreams of costly
oil paintings and rare china, but in the meantime he devoted himself to
his sisters. He and Matilda were of one mind: after their parents'
death Caroline became their only care.

Exquisite, carefully educated and beautiful, they gloried in her. They
endured the loneliness of the old Bretherto