In due course, when Adam Lawton’s parents died, his mother having been a West and the homestead her portion, he found himself absorbed in the beginnings of money-making, yet somewhere in him was a deep-buried sentiment for his boyhood’s home, stern though the life and discipline had been, and even though he found no leisure to revisit it. He therefore had installed his maternal cousin Keith in it as guardian, paying the taxes and for such improvements and repairs as kept it apace with the times. Then he promptly forgot it, except on pay days, when he justified himself to himself, the Scotch thrift in him insisting on justification, for the comparatively slight outlay, by saying half aloud to his private secretary, who did the forwarding, “A snug little place, and always worth a price; my daughter fancies it, and perhaps some day, who knows, I may like to go back there for a rest.” Thus it followed that Miss Keith and the farm had lived together for twenty years a life of almost wedded devotion. The sheep had disappeared from the hills, it is true, and four cows, a fat horse, and countless chickens and ducks represented the live stock. The cultivated ground had been reduced to a great corn-field, a potato patch, and vegetable garden, on whose borders grew fruits of all seasons, the rest of the land being sown down to rye or hay, while the woodland that protected the house on the north and east, being only required to yield kindlings, had returned to the beauty of a forest primeval, with a dense growth of oak, white pine, and hemlock, underspread with untrodden ferns, amid which, following the seasons’ call, blossomed arbutus, anemones, moccasin flowers, snow crystal Indian pipe, and partridge vine. Now, for the first time in all these years, Miss Keith was faltering in her single-hearted allegiance, and this upheaval coming on her fiftieth birthday, too, gave it a double significance. At fifty one’s ideas and person are supposed to be settled for life, but with Miss Keith her semi-centennial was the first occasion upon which she ever remembered to have felt thoroughly unsettled, and as she stood in front of the parlour mantel-shelf, arms akimbo, gazing at the _First Cause_, that rested against the wall between the fat clock and a blue china vase filled with quaking grass, she alternately frowned and smiled. This First Cause was the highly finished cabinet photograph of a man, coupled with a suggestion of marriage contained in a letter, the edge of the pale blue envelope containing which peeped from under the garrulous little clock that ticked vociferously the twenty-four hours through, and gave an alarming whir-r, suggestive of asthma in the depths of its chest, before striking every quarter and half, and mumbled a long grace before the hours.