Nor had his wife ever faltered in her loyalty to him; she would have given much more than he would take, for in the beginning hers had been a nature that sought happiness in pouring out her love freely and enveloping its object in it, at the same time giving the man she had chosen, through imagination, every noble and winning attribute that would increase her passion. Two sons had been born to her before she had awakened from this ecstatic period and was perforce obliged to separate the real from the ideal. Not that Adam Lawton loved her a degree less strongly than when, calling upon her father on purely business matters, he had first seen her riding up the unkempt avenue of her home, her beauty and bearing lending distinction to the faded habit that she wore. His love was of a strange quality, a sort of transmutation of metals by sudden fire that, having once taken place, must of necessity be welded for all time. In reality an egotist, from his own point of view he was wholly unselfish, for he asked little for what he gave, and would allow none of the little daily services that nourish love, whose best food must have the flavour of mutual dependence. The two boys died of scarlet fever almost together, before they were well out of babyhood, and after a lapse of many years a daughter, Brooke, had come, then another lapse, and another son, called Adam, now about sixteen; and like many a son of a father who has planned a boy’s career to the minutest detail, he seemed not only bound not to go in the desired way, but to lack the bump of direction, which turns a boy from being merely driftwood and guides him in any sort of way whatsoever. From habitual restraint of emotions learned in those first ten years, Mrs. Lawton had come to pass for a perfectly bred, though somewhat unsympathetic, woman. Brooke, whose own heart naturally beat as tumultuously as ever did her mother’s, had learned to feel something of this even in her early childhood, when at her father’s footstep she had been hushed in some wild exhibition of childish enthusiasm; and though she and her mother were the very best of friends, there was a certain quality missing in their intercourse. Perhaps missing is not the word,—a quality not yet developed expresses it more exactly, and this, too, came through the peculiar temperament of Adam Lawton himself. Outside of his business he had but one thought, his family, and to supply their needs as he read them, his selfishness lying in the fact that he asked so little of them, beyond their presence in his house, that it was impossible for him to judge, by intimate contact, what those needs really were, or to realize that confidence and sympathy are better coin than dollars.