So Gaines sat down. Shirley, who was quick in intuitive power, knew instinctively what awaited him. He opened the letter and read it while the two friends busied themselves with a consideration of Jim's bookcase, reading-table, and toolchest combined, all made out of one goods box with sundry trimmings. Jim said nothing when he had finished, grateful that no painful silence on the part of the other two men forced him to words until he was ready to speak. "Listen to me," he said at length. "I need your help now. When I came West life didn't seem worth living at first, but I had it on my hands and couldn't throw it away. I tried to take an interest in Asher Aydelot's home. But it is a second-rate kind of pleasure to sit by your own lonely fireside and enjoy the thought of the comfort another man has in his home with the wife of his choice." A shadow fell on Dr. Carey's face as he sat looking through the open window at the stretch of green clover down the valley. "I was about ready to call time on myself one winter here when Carey brought me a letter. It was from Alice Leigh, my brother Tank's wife. Tank and I were related--by marriage. We had the same father, but not the same mother. My mother died the day I was born. Nobody else is so helpless as a man with a one-day-old baby. My father was fairly forced into a second marriage by my step-mother, Betsy Tank. She was the housekeeper at the tavern after my mother's death. Her god was property and Tank is just like her. She married the old Shirley House. It looked big to her. Oh, well! I needn't repeat a common family history. I never had a mother, nor a wife, nor a sister, nor a brother. Even my father was early prejudiced in Tank's interest against mine, always. The one happy memory of my boyhood years was the loving interest of Asher Aydelot's mother, who made the old Aydelot farmhouse on the National road a welcome spot to me. For the Lord made me with a foolish longing for a home and all of these things--father, mother, sister, and brother." "So you have been father and mother, brother and sister to this whole settlement," Pryor Gaines said. "Which may be vastly satisfying to these relatives, but does not always fill the lack in one's own life," Horace Carey added, as a man who might know whereof he spoke.