Brooke alone had been able to break through this crust of self-sufficiency that he had used as a barrier against the world in his early days of struggle, until it now shut him off from the luxury of everything natural, uncalculated, and spontaneous. Brooke had enough of the enthusiasm of youth not to be chilled by it. She looked forward hopefully to the promised time when he should take a long holiday, and be with them, and, as she explained it, only “think foolishness.” He had never refused her anything that she asked of him, not that her wishes had ever been extravagant. Many a time, as some clever whim of hers brought a rare smile to his keen, thin face, intelligent and alive, if somewhat harshly fined and worn, he almost clinched the hand that he always kept in his left pocket in despair that this child was not the boy who should keep his name alive, instead of that other who now bore it. But in the fact that Brooke was a daughter lay all the charm, for there is no other born relationship so subtle, so potent of good for each, as that between father and daughter. For many years the Lawtons lived in an ample old-fashioned house in one of the streets converging at Washington Square, where Brooke and young Adam had been born. Here Mrs. Lawton had passed many days of quiet content and social comfort, entertaining in the open-hearted southern way that does not admit of push or hurry. True, the neighbourhood was changing, and others more ambitious were moving away; in fact, Adam Lawton had one day said the time had come when he was ready to build a modern house, in a part of the city where a home more suited to his position and a good investment could be combined, for with him the two propositions always went together.