John Strong numbered among his household chattels a daughter and a son. Twenty years had elapsed since their mother had been clamped down under a marble slab in a suburban cemetery. Judith, the daughter, mistressed the house Martha-like under her father’s supervision. Gabriel, the son, basked in the sunshine of parental favor and accepted with indolent resignation the somewhat enervating ease of fatherly patronage. Gabriel Strong had emerged from a university circle when a certain sensuous æstheticism had claimed many disciples from the ripening generation. He had imbibed certain fine sentimentalities, some affectations, much psychical color, and not a little genuine idealism. A contemplative and somewhat lazy youth, he was a member of the romantic school, a man tinged with a tender Celtic melancholy, something of a fatalist regarding the materialisms of life, and not very fervent over any particular creed. His father, who believed in culture without comprehending its significance, simultaneously admired and patronized his son. John Strong had received his education at a third-rate boarding-school, and yet appreciated in an obtuse and mercenary manner the social advantages of Eton and Oxford. He had considered culture as a creditable investment in the person of his heir. He intended him to be a gentleman of independence, singularity, and distinction. Strangely enough, he had no desire to make a mercantile Stylites of him on an office-stool. Now Gabriel Strong had eccentricities; and he was something of a poet. Not that a poetic inclination can be considered as an eccentricity in these days when the knack is too universal to be genuine. Gabriel had much of the Maurice de Guérin about him. He would trudge miles to see the sea on a moonlight night, or tumble up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the woods. He was mobile, impressionable, sensitive as dew swinging on the gossamer of a spider’s web. This very sensitiveness tempted to make him weak and pusillanimous in the minor affairs of life. Living largely in his own mental atmosphere, he approached actual existence with a listless apathy born of contempt. The past with its golden pageantry of splendor and romance alone inspired in him the desire of being. On a certain April morning the master of Saltire Hall stood watching several workmen who were laying the foundations of a new cow-house at the home farm attached to the estate. The local bailiff had been listening with discreet reverence to the tea merchant’s views on certain agricultural technicalities. John Strong delighted in Arcadian hobbies and devoured much scientific literature on the subject. He had his own beasts, pigs, and poultry; his own crops; his own dairy; his own drainage system, septic tank included. Possibly he lost some hundreds a year in his farming, but that was a detail in his expenditure that gave him no qualms of conscience.