"I must take my god-daughter in hand, or she will be ruined body and soul," observed Malcolm severely. "Babs is already a domestic tyrant, and screams the house down if any of her fads and fancies are resisted. I am thinking of writing a series of essays on degenerate and irresponsible parents, and the cruelty of modern education in the nursery, which out-Herods Herod." Of course they all laughed at this idea, and then David Carlyon crossed the room to shake hands with Malcolm and to introduce his father. The two men were curiously alike. The Rev. Rupert Carlyon was an older, shabbier, and more careworn David; but there was the same broad, intellectual brow, the same bright intelligence of expression, and their voices were so strangely similar that if Malcolm had closed his eyes he could not have distinguished between them; they both spoke with the same quickness, and in the same clipping fashion. Malcolm noticed before the evening was over that David Carlyon looked unusually pale and tired, though he seemed in excellent spirits. Dinah made the same remark to his father. "Oh, I have been giving that boy of mine a lecture," he said quickly; "he is a perfect spendthrift and prodigal with regard to the midnight oil, and burns both ends of his candle in the most reckless fashion." "I should not have thought a sleepy little place like Rotherwood would have overtaxed his energies," observed Malcolm in rather a surprised tone. The elder man shook his head. "There is always work enough if one looks for it. My son is a sort of medical missionary in his way, and concerns himself with the bodies as well as the souls of his people. The last two nights he has been up until nearly dawn with a stranger--a sort of commercial traveller who has been taken ill at 'The Plough.' It is a sad case: he is quite a young man, and our doctor fears that he will not pull through." But Mr. Carlyon forbore to state the fact that each night he had relieved his son, rising from his bed in the gray pearly dawn, before the first bird-twitter was heard, to take his watch beside the fever-stricken stranger. The Carlyons were men whose left hand did not know what their right hand did, and the Rev. Rupert Carlyon's ministry had been a record of humble, unobtrusive acts of good-will and kindness to man, woman, and child; nay, the very dumb animals knew their friend, and would come to him for protection.