The second day after the great storm, for such it came to be called, its erratic course through the hill country being blazed by lightning-splintered trees and gullied watercourses, Dr. Russell came and with him the Lawtons’ lawyer. Little by little the various happenings were made clear, his situation and as far as might be his presence at the farm explained, while, as the days went by, slowly the jarred brain fitted the links in the chain of memory. But Dr. Russell said truly, that Adam Lawton’s grit and grip were broken once for all, desire of power was dead and in its place came desire of peace. Soon the little pottering details of the farm, despised in youth, seemed dearer than aught else, and he would sit for hours in his wheel-chair, training a vine or busied with harness buckles in the barn. Nothing, however, would induce him to allow his chair to go outside the gate, or to drive about the country or to the village with Adam or Brooke upon their many errands. Side-tracked though he was to many eyes, one of his selves, the one unknown,—for most of us have two,—came back to him through kinship with the soil; and at his first words of pride in and praise of Adam’s usefulness, the boy had fled away to the rick again, great sobs tearing his throat, but in this tempest lay no dread, and with those tears the Cub cast off his nickname and leaped a year in manhood. Toward his wife Adam Lawton was all tenderness, as in the early years, and once more he called her Mela. But instead of the protective pride of lover to sweetheart, it was the twofold, leaning quality, that makes some men as they age seek the mother element in their wives and rest upon it. Before July came round the little property of Mrs. Lawton and Brooke, together with the farm deed and the jewels, was restored to them. In all it made an annual sixteen hundred dollars, less by many times than either woman had spent for clothing or the many little luxuries and nothings that smooth and beautify the daily life—yet for their station they had been frugal women, though always generous. This money did not lessen Brooke’s determination or endeavour; it simply turned striving to possibility of life in the composite household. Neither, had the sum been ten times what it was, would any of the three, mother, daughter, son, have cared to give up the work and with it motive; simply Brooke could now dream more than day-dreams of her art. Rosius, the animal painter, had built a studio at Gordon, and, after seeing a head that Brooke had done of Senator Parks’s prize bull, he had replaced his usual shrugging lethargy toward amateurs by enthusiasm, offered to criticise her work throughout the season, and take her as a student of animal anatomy in his winter studio in Washington, where the models of the Zoo would be open to her, saying, “You feel, you understand, you catch the thought, the meaning in the eyes,—this must be born, not taught, all the rest only means much work and is learnable.”