Mr. Langley was nearer fifty than forty, though only by a little. He was, in a way, ‘settled’ in his habits. He liked and affected, on all days save the Sabbath, old clothes and old shoes, though both were always scrupulously neat, and his shabbiness was never otherwise than picturesque and attractive. Though he went about constantly among his people, he led a lonely, pensive life in the big, empty, shabby parsonage, almost as little aware, it would seem, of the existence of his invalid wife as were his parishioners who practically thought of him as a bachelor. And truly, since his wife had taken to her room upwards of twenty years ago, and shut herself out from everyone, he had been almost as literally widowed as if she, too, lay in the enclosure marked by the little marble lamb in the cemetery on the hillside. For all that, Russell Langley had still somehow kept intact through all the years the heart of youth--almost of boyhood. Not that his parishioners were aware of it, except indirectly. Most of them regarded their beloved pastor and bore themselves towards him as if he had something like three score years to his credit--or debit. The boys and girls, it is true, the children and even the babies found him singularly companionable,--but so did the very oldest. The greybeards of the congregation and those who were contemporaries of Russell Langley’s grandparents talked to him as they would have talked to the latter had they been living and had their lines been cast in Farleigh instead of in Albany, New York. His youthful appearance impressed them only in the sense that he was a fine figure in the pulpit and a graceful presiding officer in the town hall whenever the services of such an one were required. His tall, slim, indolently erect figure was attributed to the fact that he had played base-ball at college, and the lack of lines in his face to freedom from family cares. For, when all is said, an invalid wife whom a clergyman sees no more frequently than an invalid parishioner and with whom he holds no conversation whatever is scarcely to be classed among family cares. It was only the other Miller girl who recognised the elusive quality that made up a large part of the charm which everyone felt in the man. Likewise when this quality had taken flight, temporarily or irretrievably, it was Anna Miller who guessed the secret of its loss. Everyone knew that the minister had never forgotten his little daughter who had died. Ella May’s name was constantly upon his lips. But Anna said to herself that the light of enthusiasm in his eye and the buoyancy of his step had been largely due to the thought of a child toddling or tripping along beside him.