Mr. Haddington came across the lawn to meet me as I kept behind Gaddy. He was tall and broad and brown, and there was something restful and enfolding about him so that I ceased to be driven to act any role whatsoever.

I drank of his understanding as I looked into his deep kind eyes, and gained assurance as he looked deeply back into mine. The world lit up with new possibilities. I was glad that Renfrew Haddington was alive and there holding me by the hand. I was refilled with the false hope of youth that happiness could come to me some day with shining face as a prince or knight and that a struggle to remain available for such an advent was worth while.

Manliness seemed to emanate from the man, with patience and strength as well as kindliness. He had bumpy features and iron grey hair, and no superfluous flesh. The eyes looked searchingly from cavernous sockets with an illumination of spirit which he could impart. Most men are so elemental that I suffocate in my antiquity of spirit by comparison, but Mr. Haddington suddenly made me feel young and overcoming as if the awful things in life could be reformed. Here was a soul and mind in which one could take refuge.

I do not remember saying much to him, yet I felt that he knew a better self of me than consciously existed. He was departing on the Melbourne Express, and could not stay to dinner.

“Men will always seek you for your sympathy and understanding,” he said, as he held my hand in parting.

I was late down to dinner, and as I came in, Edmée was discussing the recent caller in her own style, and impressed upon me that I had been highly honoured. “What do you think of him?” she asked for the third time.

“I like him better than any human being I ever met,” I said, just like that.

“The doll awakes from petrifaction,” laughed Edmée. “We must get his son over from Melbourne. He must be as old as you.”

“I have never met Mrs. Haddington,” remarked Mrs. Crasterton.

“She’s a remarkably fine woman,” said Gaddy. “She needs to be to measure up to Haddington.”

I excused myself early. I wanted to write notes of good-bye to be posted on the morrow, but instead I sat recalling how Mr. Haddington had looked as he stood talking to Gad on the lawn in the light of the setting sun while I watched him from the drawing-room window curtains. I examined the inscription in the book he had given me. Magical that his hand had written there for me, the product of his own brain. If such a man was honoured because he wrote books, surely the attempt was not unvaliant for an ignorant girl. Surely none but piffling people thought that girls should not write. Renfrew Haddington would not think so. There must be numbers of similar men in the world. I had met few because I knew so few of all kinds, and humanity in the aggregate is so chock-a-block with culls.