“Now that Brooke is educated and at home, I hear her father is building a big city house and another down by the sea somewhere, and so perhaps—when he has money enough—he will slow up and take a rest. The Lawtons and Wests are both long-lived, and Adam never drank or dissipated, I guess; but I should think at the pace he’s trotted these thirty years he’d be footsore by this, and like a back-stairs sitting room out of reach, and a loose pair of slippers.” Miss Keith grew more careless of her speech as she warmed to her subject, and Dr. Russell laughed outright at the idea of the Adam Lawton whom he had met, tall and distinguished, a bundle of steel nerves bound by will power, sitting to rest anywhere, much less in loose slippers out of the sound of the Whirlpool’s eddying. The fussy little clock in the sitting room, after making many futile remarks, like a choking _do-re-mi_, landed fairly on _do_, and struck four! Then Miss Keith, saying casually that she must skim the milk at five, began to unfold her plan matrimonial. She did not read Mrs. Dow’s letter to the doctor, but spoke from memory, with which an unexpected quality of imagination blended with dangerous frequency. Alack a day! How often are the overworked three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, pushed into the place of Truth, Experience, and Common Sense, and forced to bear responsibility not theirs! When Miss Keith had finished, the good doctor naturally supposed that she had received a direct proposal from an old-time lover who, once rejected, had married some one else in pique. Also that the making of the sister’s home the meeting place was her own idea, born of her maidenly regard of the proprieties, which regard he well knew usually strengthens in inverse proportion to the need for it! Finally, as he arose to go, she said, hovering tremulously between kitchen and sitting room, “Now that I know that you agree with me, I will ask one favour more. I have a letter that I would like to have posted in Gilead by your hand; these outdoor letter boxes sometimes leak, you know. Then I shall sleep content.” “Most certainly,” said the doctor, turning back, a smile crossing his face and lurking at his mouth corners at this latest of many vocations given him—that of Cupid’s postman, though he could not but admit that his age made him a peculiarly suitable assistant in such a belated wooing.