But when the youngest baby, who proved happily to be a girl, when the time for climbing came—when this youngest baby had been pulled and boosted by Annabel up into the tree beside her, and when two of them could sit happily side by side, looking at each other in silence, then there seemed a fairer division of forces. Gradually the boys, when they ventured far out on dangerous limbs, would feel a silent tug pulling them back to the heart of things. And underneath the tree where the children played, Eleanor sat with her sewing or reading or with the youngest baby on her lap, and sang to it or played with it till it was time for it to sleep in its cradle-box in the tree.... And Richard coming home at night, or at noon on half-holidays, would find his family there, and he would climb with the boys, or sit with Eleanor under the tree, or play with the youngest baby. Or he would stroll with his pipe back and forth across the lawn, puffing it and listening to the voices that came from the tree, or watch his wife, with the sunlight and the shadow-leaves falling on her work. Sometimes he took them all for excursions into the country—at first in street-cars, crowding and piling in; and then in the old surrey that was big enough to carry them all; and at last in the touring-car that swept up the miles. There was no pause in his prosperity; though the tax of the growing family made it a little difficult sometimes to adjust business and family demands.... And then suddenly the money began to come in and pile up faster than he could use it. He was counted one of the solid men of the region; and the family life expanded on all sides. The problem now was not whether the business could afford it, but whether the children’s characters could afford it. Richard and Eleanor sought for expensive schools that would force a child to live simply and fare hard and think keen and straight; and when no such schools were to be found, Richard took William Archer out of the expensive school that was making a nonentity of him, and put him into the business and drove him hard. And Annabel was brought home on the plea that her mother needed her. She was not quite strong that year, it seemed. So Annabel took charge of the house—and of Eleanor and Richard, and of every one in sight. XII THAT Annabel knew her own mind, there was no question; and that Annabel also knew her mother’s mind, there was no question in Annabel’s mind.... She was not perhaps altogether responsible for this feeling about her mother. It would have taken a more astute person than Annabel to discover that all that went on underneath Eleanor More’s quiet look was not open for the world to read. Annabel loved her mother and trusted her; and to the best of her ability she took care of her—though she knew, with a kind of fierce pity, that her mother could never be of her own generation, and that she could not know the real nature of the plans and visions that swept before that generation.