Then the doctor took the lead, asking home questions about Mr. Lawton and the other kin, saying, “I met your Cousin Adam last winter in New York one evening at the Century, where Martin Cortright introduced us. His is a keen and interesting face, though rather nerve-worn. As he stood among a group of financiers, that also deal liberally by the various arts, his eyes roved about, dilating and contracting strangely, as if they followed the workings of a dozen thoughts each minute, though otherwise his face remained unchanged and he never moved a muscle. “Did I like him? He is not easy to approach, and it was only when I told him that, though living at Oaklands, I go inland every autumn for the hunting, and know Gilead well, also his Cousin Keith and West farm, where I had once seen his daughter Brooke, that his eye brightened and he showed any interest, while at the same moment some one whom he had evidently been watching broke away from a distant group, and, your cousin darting off to join him, our talk ceased.” “If Adam cares for anything but money-making, which I’ve sometimes doubted, it is for Brooke,” said Miss Keith, quite at her ease again, the coffee that she was pouring being fully up to its reputation. “In fact, he deeded this farm to her on her twenty-first birthday, all on the strength of her girlish whim and talk long ago about the _River Kingdom_. This also makes me feel uncertain about my stay here. What if Brooke should marry and _he_ should wish her to sell the place? Not that Adam has ever said a word to me about the transfer, and he pays the taxes and what not just the same, but Job Farrish was looking up his boundaries last spring and saw the deed recorded in the Town House. In fact, Adam himself never writes nowadays, his secretary does it all; and even Brooke has only written once this year, and that was when I said the gutter having leaked, the north room needed new paper, and she sent it—pretty it is, too, wild roses running through a rustic lattice—she’s always had an open eye for colour.” “What! is that gypsy child twenty-one?” exclaimed the doctor in surprise, pushing back his chair so as to pull Tatters’ head between his knees and stroke his ears, at the same time that he drew his coffee cup toward him, sniffing the subtle aroma, only second in his nostrils to that of the fresh earth in spring and his beloved pipe. “It seems but a year or so since she was roving about the lane with her hair flying and Tatters after her,—the two were inseparable.” “Twenty-one! Why, Dr. Russell, that time was eight years ago, the second autumn you came up to hunt with Silent Stead. She’s turned _twenty-four_, and that Tatters was this one’s uncle; they say there has been a dog of the name in the family this hundred years and more.