moving among his fellows with such splendid popularity, filled him with pride and gladness. Here indeed was a very concrete evidence of his reward for that long, arduous struggle.

Like most men who have concentrated upon one thing, Dr. Guthrie was a child when it came to others. Athleticism, of which he knew nothing, filled him with admiration. The knack of conversation amazed him. Even to his wife he found it difficult to talk. To force himself to confide was almost impossible—it was like blasting a rock. One afternoon however he got nearer to an intimate expression of his feelings than ever before—perhaps because he was still under the influence of the intoxication of the youthfulness all about him.

Kenyon had driven them out after tea to Shotover Hill. All the young people had gone on to Cuddesden, leaving the doctor and his wife to sit and look down into the valley far below in which nestled the town and all its colleges and spires. It had been a golden day and the sun was setting with all the dignity and pomp of early summer, making the thin line of the Thames shine like a winding silver ribbon. There was something of exultation over the earth that evening and of untranslatable beauty, and the evening song of the birds was like that of choristers in a great cathedral.

Unusual words seethed in the doctor's head. He was moved and thrilled. The rest and the relief of leaving his work, all the bustle and stir of the new life in which he was a temporary figure, seemed to take him back to his own early days when, with the little woman who sat by his side, he had stood with her in their first house, newly married.

He took his hat off, put his arm round the shoulders of that faithful woman and kissed her cheek with a touch of passion and gratitude. "My darling," he said, "I wish I could say properly some of the things that I feel about you and my children and the goodness of God. There are tears in my heart, and strange feelings. I feel oddly young and strong. I want to laugh and cry. I'd like to pick wild flowers and make a little crown for your head. Don't laugh at me—please don't laugh."

The little woman took his thin hand and pressed it to her cheek. "I laugh because that is how I feel, too," she said,—"young and glad and very happy to see my big Peter doing such wonderful things, and still a boy. Dear old man, we have much to be thankful for! I know how you've worked and striven,—and how fine it is to see some of the results of it. I was a little afraid before we came here that we might find Peter different—altered—perhaps older—but he's just the same. He's exactly like you."

The Doctor shook his head and a sudden pain twisted his thin, studious face. "Oh no, no," he said, "I was never like that. I wish to God I had been. But it was to make Peter what he is that I've worked night and day. He's my idea of a man. He's doing all the things that I'd like to have done. He's me as I might have been if I'd had any luck—any sort of a chance. Do I regret it? Am I jealous? No; because if I hadn't lived such an opposite life I mightn't have desired to give my boy all this." He waved his hand towards the spires that rose in all their significance out of the town away below. And then, with intense eagerness and a ring of wistfulness in his voice that brought tears to his wife's eyes, he bent towards her. "Do you think he realizes this, Mary? Does Graham ever stop to think how hard I've worked to put him in Wall Street? Does Belle ever wonder what it's cost me in youth and health to give her so much more than she needs? I'm—I'm a queer, wordless, foolishly shy man. Old since the time they all three began to think and use their eyes,—necessarily concentrated and aloof away in that laboratory of mine, and—and sometimes I wonder whether my children know me and understand and make allowances. Do they, Mary, my dear one? Do they?"

"Yes, my man, my brave and splendid man," she replied, "they do, they do!" And in saying this she deliberately lied,—out of her great and steadfast love for this man of hers she lied.

No one knew so well as she did that the father of her children might almost as well be a mere distant relation who lived in their home for reasons of convenience and allotted money to their requirements at the proper time. No one knew so well as she did that Hunter Guthrie's tragic lack of childhood had dried out of his nature the power of understanding children. Never having been a child in any sense of the word—never having known the inexpressible joy of a mother's love—remembering nothing but a father who was either working hard or tired out—he was unable to conceive what his own children needed in addition to all that they got hourly from his wife and from his own work. It had always seemed to him that in the possession of a mother they had everything good that God could give them. It seemed to him that his own part was performed by providing for their needs. No man desired to be the father of sons and daughters more than he did. No man was prouder in the possession of them than he was and had always been. To hear the patter of their little feet about his house sent him to his work with that sense of religion of which Carlyle wrote. To watch them shaping from childhood into youth was the most satisfactory and beautiful thing in his life. To be able, year after year, to do better and still better for them was his best and biggest reward—far greater and more glorious than the distinction he earned for himself and the international reputation that increased with each of his discoveries. And when, six months after Peter had left home to go to Oxford with a Rhodes scholarship, he found himself unexpectedly endowed to the extent of over three million dollars under the will of a late wealthy patient, so that he might, in the old man's own words, "devote himself, without the fret and fever of earning a livelihood as a practitioner, to the noble and limitless work of a bacteriologist for the benefit of suffering humanity all over the world," it was for the sake of his children that he offered up thanks. With what immense pride he notified the authorities at Harvard that his son was independent of the scholarship, which was free to send another man to Oxford. With what keen pleasure he was able to buy Graham a seat on the Stock Exchange, bring Belle out as a débutante and send his little Ethel to the best possible school. These things he could do, and did, but he could not and had never been able to do for them a better thing than all these,—win their confidence, their deep affection and their friendship. That gift had been killed in him. It could not be acquired, taught or purchased, and he had always been as much out of touch with his boys and girls as though he were divided from them by a great stone wall. It had always been with them, "Look out! Here's father!" instead of "Hello! Here's Dad!" His entrance into their playroom was the signal for silence. The sight of his studious face and short-sighted eyes and distrait, shy manner chilled them and reduced them to quietude and self-consciousness and suspicion. If he had treated them always as human beings, played with them, sat on the floor and built houses with their bricks, thrown open the door of his study to them, if only for half an hour every day, so that there might be no possibility of its becoming a Blue Room; if he had, as they grew into the habit of thinking and observing and remembering, told them about himself and his own boyhood and in this way inculcated a mutual interest, a desire to respond and open out; if, before the two boys had gone to college he had had the courage to act on the earnest advice of a friend and speak to them on the vital question of sex, give them the truth