"Then Aunt Zilla may be right," Mary observed, quietly. "You may be sad because you have no home; perhaps that is what she reads in your face. Now that I come to think of it, you do seem to look lonely and isolated. Somehow I can't imagine your being contented here with us. You are so different, somehow, from our young men. I don't know in what way, particularly, but you are different, and so I am actually afraid that you will decide to--to go somewhere else. If you do, Mr. Brown, don't let anything I have said about--about needing your help stop you." They were on the path approaching the house; he paused suddenly, and they faced each other. "I wish I could remove those ideas from your mind for good and all, Miss Rowland," he said, almost huskily, in his earnestness. "It is the second time you have mentioned the subject and I want you to understand the truth. My life for the last year has been one of restless torment. I gave up traveling with the circus to settle down on a farm. Something told me I would like it, but nothing told me that I would find work with such kind persons as you and your father. The truth is, I am so contented here that I am afraid"--he was laughing now--"that I shall wake up and find myself in that rumbling freight-train again, with canvas to unload, ropes to stretch, and stakes to drive." "Well, I'll not bring it up again," she promised, with a sigh of relief. "I wouldn't have done it, but Zilla set me thinking on that line. I do want you to feel at home here, and it is not all selfishness, either. I've had trouble--I'm having plenty of it now--and somehow I feel that you have had more than your share somehow, somewhere." The words were half tentative; she eyed him expectantly, but he made no response. They were at the veranda now, and he turned into the hall and went up to his room. He found that his bag had come, and, quickly putting on the suit of clothes it contained, he hurried down. The suit was a good, well-fitting one, bought with his old taste for such things, and in the lamplight he presented quite a changed appearance. He remarked the all but surprised look in Mary's face when he met her in the dining-room, but she made no comment. She had not changed her dress, and was waiting for him in her place at the head of the table. "Father has eaten and gone back to his books," she said. "He takes very little nourishment. That is one good thing in ancestry worship, it saves food in his case. He can live on a biscuit and a glass of milk a day if he is on the track of a fresh twig for our tree."