Reuben Cartwright’s father had built the house in the lane at Farleigh, and one who had known Dick Cartwright well would have said the cottage was like him. There was something odd and unusual about it which gave it a peculiar charm without making it startling or bizarre; and something of his whimsicality seemed to have crept into the arrangement of nooks and corners and cupboards and bookcases. Oddest of all was the living-room, which was disproportionately large and contained a good-sized platform, raised three feet or more above the floor, which was to have held the pipe organ which the years were to have brought. But the years, instead of bringing the pipe organ, fame and other desiderata, material and otherwise, had taken away from Dick Cartwright his greatest blessing, his wife and sweet-heart whose presence and companionship had been the necessary conditions of fulfilling and enjoying his dreams. And after her death, the quaint cottage with the platform for the organ and the odd bits of furniture he had made and carved were only a mockery to Dick Cartwright. He had his little boy, it is true, who was very like his mother, and he had Mr. Langley as an intimate friend; but he could not forget Jessie and he took to drink to ease the torture remembrance was. Whereupon he forgot not only Jessie but their child and his duty as well. He lost his place as organist at Farleigh church and as book-keeper at one of the banks at Wenham. And when presently, three years after the death of his wife, he disappeared, it was found that he had lost his house also and all his possessions. When news of his death in a railway wreck near Chicago came to Mr. Langley, who had meanwhile sheltered Reuben, he made enquiries and found that the cottage had been mortgaged to its full value. The bank at Wenham which held the mortgage offered the cottage for sale, then, when no purchaser appeared, for rent. Soon after, an elderly couple whose married daughter lived in the South Hollow took it and occupied it for six years until early in the preceding summer when their daughter had been widowed and they had gone to live with her. The cottage stood idle all summer but early in September a new family moved in, a mother and daughter, the first strangers to come to the village for years. No one knew whence they came nor who they were. They moved in so quietly that scarcely anyone knew the house was occupied until they saw smoke coming from the squat, picturesque chimney.