To Stephen Jarvis, pursuing to all outward appearance the even tenor of a way long trodden, came slight intimation of the changes in himself—the self deep submerged beneath the surface of everyday life. He still loaned money on bond and mortgage, exacting, as was his custom, the highest legal rate of interest. As in the past, he looked sharply after his investments, foreclosing when foreclosure had become due and inevitable, and manipulating such conservative purchases of stocks and bonds as his accumulating capital appeared to require. He was conscious of but one thing, and that was that these procedures no longer afforded him pleasure. They were, on the contrary, in the nature of labor. After a little, the labor became grinding in its demands upon him. Gradually, too, he found that the heavy looks and sad faces of certain of his debtors had the power to hurt him. One day he actually yielded to the importunities of a poor widow, not openly, indeed, but through a trusted agent of his, restoring to her the home she had lost. Once indulged, this folly (as he called it), grew upon him stealthily. More and more frequently he found himself giving; still secretly, because in his mind giving still appeared to him a despicable weakness. Yet he continued to impart (where he must) with that keen discrimination and sound judgment which had always distinguished his operations in finance. As yet no one suspected him. To have incurred a suspicion of benevolence would have shamed him little less than a well-founded conjecture of crime on the part of those who had always known him. Nevertheless, he who runs may read the legible handwriting of God on the faces of men. The cold, immobile features of the grasping money-getter changed subtly, as was indeed inevitable, into something more human; his eyes looked out from beneath his sternly modelled brows as keenly as ever, yet in their very penetration there was a veiled light not visible before. Perhaps the creature who might have told the most unbelievable story of the change in Stephen Jarvis was his horse. He no longer drove under the lash and with the cowardly curb-bit. He simply did not care any longer for the sensation afforded by beating down an inferior intelligence with his own brute force. No other reason for this particular change in his habits had as yet occurred to him. He still used fast horses; but he ceased to abuse them. Nearly two months had elapsed since his last visit to the Preston farm. On that occasion he had entreated Barbara not to shame him before the crowd assembled for the auction; and she had refused to listen. Then he had gone away. Something of what followed had been repeated to him. And since he had learned of the return of David Whitcomb from the West; of his spectacular part in the bidding, and of his subsequent visits to the farm.