could give him. How would it do to ask him to visit us for a fortnight, after we get settled?"
At the end of the first week of that fortnight, Mrs. Barton said to her son, "He's got to stay, Robert. I want him. I've taken a liking to him."
Robert Barton was not surprised. Nathan was the kind of man whom people did take a liking to. Big, slow-moving, he was like a Newfoundland dog in some ways, instinctively gentle toward soft and small creatures, and to everybody steady and confidence-inspiring.
Nathan's reticence about the pretty girl whom Mrs. Barton had seen him marry with her own eyes, and sent him off with in her own limousine afterward, was the only thing about him that did not please her. He was talkative enough about his early life—his mother, for instance, that horrible brute of a step-father, and his travels; but mention the little brown-eyed creature in the Boulangeat gown, and he became as dumb as the sphinx. It was odd, when he seemed so devoted. Well, Mrs. Barton would help him all she could, even if he wouldn't confide in her. She would surround him with the refining influences of home, as she knew so well how to do. It was in Mrs. Barton's well-appointed dining-room that Nathan first ate oranges with a pointed spoon, and drank black coffee from tiny cups with little handles; in her living-room that he learned to stand up (as Robert occasionally did) when his mother entered a room; to anticipate her wishes (as Robert seldom did) about shades to be lowered, windows to be raised, doors closed, or chairs moved.
On the February night that Nathan sat in Mrs. Barton's sitting-room before her fire, he was still
