twenty years. Laura was interested in the organization of the
unions, and though the Doctor carped at it and made fun of Grant, it was
largely to stir up a discussion in which his daughter would take a vital
interest.

Grant was getting something more than a local reputation in labor
circles as an agitator, and was in demand as an organizer in different
parts of the valley. He worked at his trade more or less, having rigged
up a steel device on the stump of his right forearm that would hold a
saw, a plane or a hammer. But he was no longer a boss carpenter at the
mines. His devotion to the men and in the work they were doing seemed to
the Nesbits to awaken in their daughter a new interest in life, and so
they made many obvious excuses to have the Adamses about the Nesbit
home.

Kenyon was growing into a pale, dreamy child with wonderful eyes,
lustrous, deep, thoughtful and kind. He was music mad, and read all the
poetry in the Nesbit library--and the Doctor loved poetry as many men
love wine. Hero-tales and mythology, romances and legends Kenyon read
day after day between his hours of practice, and for diversion the boy
sat before the fire or in the sun of a chilly afternoon, retailing them
in such language as little Lila could understand. So in the black night
of sorrow that enveloped her, Laura Nesbit often spent an hour with
Grant Adams, and talked of much that was near her heart.

He was strong, sometimes she thought him coarse and raw. He talked the
jargon of the agitator with the enthusiasm of a dervish and the
vernacular of the mine and the shop and the forge. But in him she could
see the fire of a mad consuming passion for humanity.

During those days of shame and misery, when the old interests of life
were dying in her heart, interests upon which she had built since her
childhood--the interests of home, of children, of wifehood and
motherhood, to which in joy she had consecrated herself, she listened
often to Grant Adams. Until there came into her life slowly and feebly,
and almost without her conscious realization of it, a new vision, a new
hope, a new path toward usefulness that makes for the only happiness.

As the Doctor went whistling into the storm that December night, he went
over in his mind rather seriously the meaning and the direction and the
final outcome of those small, unconscious buddings of interest in social
problems that he saw putting forth in his daughter's mind. Above
everything else, h