A few days before cottons took their terrific rise during the civil war, Mr. Harbison had stocked in thousands of yards. Those were Fairfield’s best days, and he kept a general store, making money so rapidly that the lazy people around him felt helplessly injured. He began his fine brick house, building on a generous and artistic plan, at the edge of Fairfield, where he could surround himself with fruit-trees, and have fields for his cattle. Whether it is a more distinct misery to build the temple of your home and see someone else inhabit it, or to shelter yourself for years in a house you have not the power of finishing, the latter fate was reserved for the Harbisons. With a crash they came down from what had been Fairfield’s opulence nearly to a level with Fairfield’s poverty. They kept the house and grounds and a meadow, but under such weight of mortgages that it was comparatively no grief at all to see the ornamental cornices lying around the partly plastered parlors, balustrades and newel-post standing on end beside the skeleton stairway, and to find the bathroom useless except as a rubbish closet. The man who had employed half of Fairfield was now obliged to become himself an employee, and the general verdict of the world against those who fail was emphasized by communistic envy. But the habit of being a woman of consideration is not easily forgotten. Mrs. Harbison still made the village respect her. She had something to give to the poorest. She was the wife of a man who had made a fortune before he lost it, and sat in the state Senate. More than all, she had her children, the eldest of them a continual surprise to her. He seemed born to stir her pride and tenderness to their depths. He was tall, fair, and Roman-featured, shy as a girl toward every one but his mother, and so ravenous in mind that he was partly through college when his father’s reverses brought him home. Then he was seized with a spotted fever, and approached the next world so close that he left part of his faculties there, and was never the same Willie he had been before. He could hear nothing, and seldom spoke an audible word--Mrs. Harbison’s boy, who was made to take the world by storm--and what had been the shyness of a country-bred youth became the set-apart seclusion of a hoofed and goat-eared faun. Willie Harbison was to be seen whirring as noiseless as a bat upon his bicycle across the open ground at dusk. He was met coming from the woods, silent as an Indian, and his eyes were on everything in earth or sky except the human beings just before him.