She was pretty—she was very pretty in those days. But it was not Stella’s bright eyes and bright cheeks that Stephen Dallas thought about most, after that first call. It hadn’t been quite dark when he arrived. Before he was sure that the red cottage was the house where Stella lived, he had noticed the morning-glories and wild-cucumber vines.

When later that first evening he discovered that Stella had planted the vines herself, had built much of the summer-house, driven all the nails in the diamond lattice-work, done all the painting, it had set him to thinking. Out of a bundle of plasterer’s laths and a handful or two of common little seeds, she had created a charming spot. As he leaned back in the Gloucester hammock, and gazed at Stella on the step below him, the simplicity of her setting, the absence from it of everything that required accumulated wealth to possess, had been soothing and comforting to Stephen, suffering as he was—suffering as he had been for the last year and a half.

2

STEPHEN WAS YOUNG then, barely twenty-three, but for eighteen months he had felt nothing but the resignation of old age, and the bitterness of disappointed old age. It had never occurred to Stephen Dallas that disgrace, disaster, utter and complete ruin, could befall him. He had taken it for granted always that he would fulfill, to a greater or less degree, his expectations for himself, and his family’s and friends’ expectations for him, too. Whether as a doctor or lawyer, or business man of ability, he didn’t know which, before he went East to school, but in some capacity he would fill a position of responsibility in this home city. It had always been understood that when Stephen’s education was completed, he would return to that home city, where he had been born, and where his father had been born before him, and continue to add honor to the family reputation.

It was a reputation to be proud of. The Dallases of Reddington, Illinois, were a respected and honored family. The Dallas house, built by Stephen’s grandfather, was quiet and unostentatious in appearance, but solid, substantial—a big, square brick affair, painted dull brown. There was something so solid and substantial about everything connected with the Dallases, that people in Reddington supposed them to be infallible, as immune to panics and market fluctuations as an oak to the varying antics of the elements.