She was just past forty the day Joe Thorne came. She could still see him as he entered in his blue overcoat with a velvet collar. A big powerful man with prominent eyes like Bismarck's, and a heavy dark brown mustache bulging over his upper lip. He did not expect to give much time to the interview. He had come to see if Miss Bennett would do to bring up his daughter, who at ten years was giving him trouble. He wanted her prepared for the social opportunities he intended her to have. It seemed strange to him that a person who lived as simply as Miss Bennett could really have these social opportunities in her control, but he had been advised by people whom he trusted that such was the fact, and he accepted it. He was the son of a Kansas farmer, had left the farm as a boy and settled in a small town, and had learned the trade of bricklaying. By hard work he gradually amassed a few hundred dollars, and this he invested in a gravel bank just outside the town. It was the only gravel bank in the neighborhood and brought him a high return on the money. Then just as the gravel was exhausted the town began to spread in that direction, and Thorne was arranging to level his property and sell it in building lots, when a still more unexpected development took place. Oil was struck in the neighborhood, and beneath Thorne's gravel lay a well. If Fate had intended him to be poor she should never have allowed him to make his first thousand dollars, for from the moment he had any surplus everything he touched did well. In one of his trips to the Louisiana oil district he met and married a local belle, a slim, pale girl with immense dark-circled black eyes and a skin like a gardenia. She followed him meekly about the country from oil wells to financial centers until after the birth of her daughter. Then she settled down in Kansas City and waited his rare visits. The only inconsiderate thing she had ever done to him was to die and leave him with an eight-year-old daughter. For several stormy years he tried various solutions--foreign governesses who tried to marry him, American college girls who attempted to make him take his fair share of parental responsibility, an old cousin who had been a school teacher and dared to criticize his manner of life. At last his enlarging affairs brought him to New York and he heard of Miss Bennett. He heard of her through Wiley, his lawyer. Wiley, a man in the forties, then attaining preeminence at the bar in New York, had been thought by many people to be an ideal husband for Adeline. They were old friends. He admired her, wished her well, and thought of her instantly when his new client applied to him for help.