"Alexander----" began his father noisily, but the boy had stepped out of doors with a face changed from natural gravity to impishness. Rutherford shouted at his wife. "Clara, I've had enough of it. He'd defy me if I lay dying. As if I wasn't fit to touch the books! There's something wrong with the lad." "Jim, don't wake that poor man with your shouting," she said briskly. She looked serene and competent. "Eat your breakfast. And as for Alexander, he didn't choose you for his father, and it's for you to make him glad he's got you"--her tone changed--"as glad as I am that you're my man." He flushed. "Clara, is it true that you're still glad?" She had time to drop a light kiss on his hand before Alexander darkened the doorway. Edward Webb's first waking thought was that his nightshirt was a new acquaintance. It was rougher than his own, and so long that he felt like a babe in swaddling clothes--an apt simile, as he would have confessed had he been able to see himself disinterestedly, for his face, worn as it was with anxieties, had in it something of youth and indestructible innocence. He had slept for hours without a movement, and only his head was visible above the smoothly turned sheet, but he brought forth an arm and examined his sleeve. It was drab-coloured, and striped with pink. It was not his. He looked about him, and remembered. He was in the house of the Good Samaritans. There was a boy with dark eyes, and a woman who had appeared to him as Warmth and Strength, and, more dimly, a man who had helped him to bed--a tall, dark man. No doubt this was his nightshirt--a durable garment, but irritating to the skin. He wondered what time it was. He had no idea how long he had slept, nor at what hour he had found the valley and the white house, with its blessed signs of habitation; but it was at the first breath of dawn that he had left his rocky perch, and, stumbling, falling, almost crying aloud in misery, had made his way down the mountain. Memory took him again through the night's adventure, and farther back--to last Monday morning, when he had bidden Theresa good-bye. It was their habit, when he started on his journeying, to play their game of Beauty and the Beast. "What shall I bring back this time, Beauty?" he would ask, and she, glowing at the name she wished were justly hers, would clasp her hands ecstatically before she answered: "A white satin dress, please, dear Papa, and shoes to match, with silver roses on them, and a silver rose for my hair." Or it might be a string of diamonds, a great feathered fan, a boar-hound to be her stately guardian. "The real Beauty," he reminded her one day, "was content with a single rose from a garden." "I know," she said, and for a moment lost her brightness; but then, "I think that's lovely in a story," she told him. "Yes." She acted it. "'Bring me a white rose, Papa. I don't want anything else.' But she would, you know, when it came all faded. But I'm glad the story lets her say that."