Most people thought it a curious thing that Susannah's destiny seemed to have nothing better in store than attendance upon a half-crippled old man. But most people scarcely realise as a truth that, to the accomplishment of any end, no matter how obvious or how commonplace, there is required a procession of acquiescent circumstances which would make the observer giddy, could he see it. Any human being who meets a stranger in the road has only to think of the chain of chances--each of which has fulfilled itself--to be forged before that meeting can be brought about, and of the one link whose lack would be the undoing of the whole. We speak of 'the hour and the man' as though they were the only ingredients of fate, and as if their simultaneous appearance were all that was needed. But the hour may come and the man with it, and some untoward arrangement of detail may triumph over both. Everything had gone smoothly with Susannah but the one detail of her own temperament. She had grasped life with both hands, caring no whit how much good others got out of it and thinking only of the passing day. She could not remember the time when masculine eyes had not followed her, and now, though her sun had passed its zenith, they followed her still. It was nearly three years since she had arrived to keep house for her uncle and so been thrown against her cousin Heber. Though few men had come to close quarters with her disturbing personality without feeling its influence, the shepherd, unlike others in this as in most of his ways, had treated her with the plain friendliness he might have shown to a man. Perhaps it was this that made Susannah feel for him what she had never felt for the many who had courted her and whom she had looked upon as mere pleasant accessories of life.