Baynell was a man who could be allured by a pretty face, but he could never have fallen in love with a woman merely for her beauty. He was possessed of insistent ideals, and now and then these were shattered by an evidence of Mrs. Gwynn's incongruously bitter cynicism, or a touch of repellent hardness and an icy coldness unpleasing in one so young, and all his preconceived prejudices were to adjust anew. He was beginning at last to feel that he must seek to realize her nature, rather than to fit her into the niche awaiting the conventional goddess of his fancy. She had other traits as inconsistent with her youth, her grace, her beauty, her lissome gait, her delicate hand; and these were homespun virtues, so plain, so good, so useful, so aggressive--such as one may fancy are designed to compensate the possessor for limitations in a more graceful sort,--according with an angular frame, a near-sighted vision, a rasping voice. There was scant need to look so beautiful, so daintily speculative, as she sat and cast up the judge's household accounts in a big red book that seemed full of cobweb perplexities and strenuous calculations to make both ends meet. Sometimes she brought it over to her uncle and, placing it before his reluctant gaze, pointed out some item of his own extravagance with a dignity of rebuke and a look of superior wisdom that might have realized to the imagination Minerva herself. Such a wealth of good house-keeping lore, so accurately applied, might have justified any amount of feminine ugliness. Her tender, far-sighted, commiserative appreciation of the deaf-mute's limitations, and the simple measures that had so far nullified them and utilized all the child's capacity, were incongruous with the iron rule under which the three were held. "I am afraid the ladies are giving you a great deal of trouble, Leonora," her uncle said one day, apologetically, when absolute mutiny seemed abroad amongst them. "Not half so much trouble as I intend to give them," Mrs. Gwynn replied resolutely. Their meek, mild, readjusted little faces after the scholastic hours were over were enough to move a heart of stone, and now and again Judge Roscoe glanced uneasily at them, and at last said inappropriately enough:-- "I am afraid you have not had a happy morning, ladies." "They have been brought to hear reason," Mrs. Gwynn observed dryly. "And I have heard reason, too,--the Fourth Line of the Multiplication Table recited backward four times, standing facing the wall. It is an exercise that tends to subdue the angry passions. Allow me to commend it for general experiment." Baynell sought to laugh the episode off genially with the "ladies," but the three little faces looked for permission to ridicule this dire experience, and as Mrs. Gwynn's countenance maintained a blank inscrutability, they did not venture to make merry over their miseries of the "Four Line," now happily overpast.