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 Bretherton home while she visited with schoolmates, or travelled abroad with new and gayer friends. Caroline was the music of their dull lives; the art of their prosaic existences. Then the shock came when she announced her engagement to Lansing Hertford, an idle, useless son of a down-at-the-heel Southern family. "He's no fit mate for you, Caroline," Markham said alarmedly. "That may be, brother," the girl had replied, "but I must marry him. You have always said one must learn his own lesson, not another's. I am ready to take the consequences. I could never get away from the sound of Lansing Hertford's voice. I hear him at night. He tells me that when temptation or weakness overpowers him he breathes my name. So, you see, dear, I cannot escape." "Don't be a fool, Caroline!" Markham struggled against the sense of impotency surging around him. "It's my lesson, dear. I'll never wince." And she never had, even when Hertford's indifference changed to cruelty. After the birth of her child, Caroline Hertford failed rapidly and the end of her lesson came when her boy was two years old. Markham and Matilda had desired to take the baby then, but Mrs. Olive Treadwell, Hertford's married sister, put in a protest. "It would blight the boy's future if any gossip touched the dead mother or bereaved father; besides he is too young to change nurses or environment." When little Lansing was seven his father died abroad under conditions shrouded with secrecy, and then it was that Olive Treadwell sought Levi Markham and by methods unknown to the simple, direct man, contrived to interest him in her nephew and his.