In the opinion of the older girls, grief had wrecked Mr. David's life; he had intended to be a clergyman, but had left the theological school because his eyes gave out. "He cried himself nearly blind," the girls told each other with great satisfaction. After that he tried one occupation after another, but somehow failed in each; which was proof of a delicacy of constitution induced by sorrow. Furthermore, he seemed pursued by a cruel fortune--"Fate," the girls called it. Elderly, unromantic Old Chester did not use this fine word, but it admitted pursuing disaster. For instance: there was the time that David undertook the charge of a private library in Upper Chester, and three months afterwards the owner sold it! Then Mr. Hays found a job for him, and just as he was going to work he was laid up with rheumatism. And again Tom Dilworth got him a place as assistant book-keeper; and David, after innumerable tangles on his balance-sheet, was obliged to say, frankly, that he had no head for figures. But he was willing to do anything else--"_any_ honest work that is not menial," he said, earnestly. And Tom said, why, yes, of course, only he'd be darned if he knew what to suggest. But he added, in conjugal privacy, that David ought to be hided for not turning his hand to something. "Why doesn't he try boot-blacking? Only, I suppose, he'd say he couldn't make the change correctly. He doesn't know whether two and two make five or three--like our Ned." "Why, they make four, Tom," said Mrs. Dilworth. And Thomas stared at her, and said, "You don't say so!" There had been no end of such happenings; "and none of them my brother's fault," Miss Ellen told the sympathetic older girls, who glanced sideways at Mr. David and wished that they might die and be mourned as Mr. David mourned Maria. The fact was, the habit of failure had fastened upon poor David; and in the days when Miss Ellen's school was in its prime (before the new people told our parents that her teaching was absurdly inadequate), he was depending on his sister for his bread-and-butter. That Miss Ellen supported him never troubled the romantic souls of Miss Ellen's pupils any more than it troubled Miss Ellen--or Mr. David. "Why shouldn't she?" the girls would have demanded if any such rudely practical question had been asked; "he is so delicate, _and he has a broken heart!_" So that was how it happened that the pupils were able to have palpitating glimpses of him, walking listlessly about the garden, or dozing in a sunny window over an old magazine, or doing some pottering bit of carpentering for Miss Ellen, but never losing his good looks or the grieved melancholy of his expression. Miss Ellen had been teaching for twenty years.