At ten, Rosalind began to pour her father’s coffee, perched in a high-backed chair with her toes hardly touching the footstool. She was a child at heart and full of the whims and tempers of childhood; she both loved and hated with a will, but as she took all her perplexities to her father to be sifted, he still managed to shield her from trouble, and in the next years that followed, the love of books, woods, flowers, and birds were woven into the fabric that bound the pair together. The little crib by his bedside had been replaced by a white, draped bed in the adjoining dressing-room, but she still knelt at his knees to say “Our Father,” and in her love blended the actual and spiritual father in her prayers. “Wait until she is eighteen and the beaux begin to come,” said the croakers; “her father will then have to give up first place, and may not be able to shield her from disappointment.” But at twenty the change had not yet come; all the younger men flocked to her, but her fraternal comradeship was so decided that one boundary-line served for all. One, Henry Benton, a man of thirty, a favourite of her father’s and likely to succeed him also, showed others what he felt, even though Rosalind did not see it, and one of those who saw was the Professor, and he stood appalled. To him Rosalind was still a child to whom his love was sufficient; as a woman she found him still all in all, but did he wish it to be so now that he realized? He was nearing sixty-five and soon to retire from the university, for though his mental vigour was unimpaired, he had oftentimes an unaccountable fatigue that made father tell him that one cannot expect the heart at threescore to stand the pressure it did at two. What would happen after him? It might then be too late. Had he been selfish all these years, selfish through blind contentment? Father love is often the most unselfish of all affections and best able to act free from hope of reward, and less self-centred than the mother love, even as her body is centred and dependent upon her maternity. Yet he felt himself at that moment an egotist. Though it cut the Professor to the quick, he did all that a tactful man might to throw Benton and Rosalind naturally together, until, though she showed no tell-tale eagerness or emotion, she looked for his coming as a matter of course. At this juncture, the spring of his retiring came, and the Professor and Rosalind came back to Oaklands, where Catharine, now over forty, was living alone, Miss Hewlett having decided the fall before upon a year’s trip abroad; and it was toward the possible spectacle of the daughters as rivals and the father’s position between the two, that village attention was turned, for it would be very marked should two separate households be maintained for only three people.