As he crossed the churchyard to his house the thing was forced more clearly and strongly upon him; he saw, with the fine instinct of love, that this was what she would have wished, that the child must grow up to think well of her, and to take her place. A man of rare singleness of life and purpose, he had been capable only of single emotions; and those emotions must, of necessity, be great. His dogged patience in waiting for one woman through all the best years of his life had had in it much of heroism; that was ended, and he turned now to something else to fill his days. The child should do it; the child had been sent for that very purpose. Over and over again the words came back to him, "He cometh up--like a flower." That was very beautiful; it seemed strange that he had not thought of that before. He dreamed a dream, even as the woman had done, of all that the child was to be to him. He went into the room where the scrap of humanity lay sleeping against the strange woman's breast; the woman glanced up at him almost resentfully as he bent over the child; just such another child had lain warm against her, and this one filled the void in her heart a little. She was a humble creature, of no subtle emotions whatever; her sense of motherhood, so recently awakened, was the strongest feeling in her. The man touched the baby's cheek with a hesitating forefinger, and then turned away and walked out of the room. He saw quite clearly how the child would grow up, knowing only him, desiring no one else to fill its world. Before another hour had passed, the solitary man had mapped out the seat the child should take in the house and in church; had wandered in fancy over the fields through which the child should accompany him. There was no disloyalty to the dead woman in all this; the child had sprung out of the woman, in every sense, and took her place quite naturally in the deep heart of the man. That evening David Willis received an unexpected visitor. The visitor came slowly and timidly, and yet with a certain forced air of defiance upon him, up the garden path, and knocked at the door of the little house. The one servant the house boasted, and who did not sleep there, had gone to her own home at the other end of the town; David Willis opened the door, and stared out into the twilight at the visitor. The caller was a little man--very alert and very upright, with a tightly buttoned frock coat, and an old-fashioned silk hat with a curly brim. He carried something in one hand behind him. David Willis remembered to have seen him once or twice in the streets, walking very erect, and swinging a cane with a tassel attached to it; and always in church on Sundays, where he occupied a little odd pew in one corner, and gave the responses in a very loud and sonorous voice not at all fitting to his stature. David held the door in one hand, and looked out wonderingly at the little man.