"That you, Dad?" called a fresh young voice.

"Sounds like it, doesn't it?" he laughed back. "Come down and give me
my breakfast. There's a beautifully assorted smell of coffee and fried
bacon wafting out from the dining room, and I can't bear it any longer."

An unfeeling giggle from above was the only answer, and the Reverend
Alan made his way into the house, pausing to sling his bath-towel
picturesquely over one of the pegs of the hat-stand as he passed
through the hall.

He was incurably disorderly, and only the strenuous efforts of his
daughter Joan kept the habit within bounds. Since the death of her
mother, nearly ten years ago, she had striven to fill her place and to
be to this lovable, grown-up boy who was her father all that his adored
young wife had been. And so far as material matters were concerned,
she had succeeded. She it was who usually found the MS. of his sermon
when, just as the bells were calling to service, he would come leaping
up the stairs, three at a time, to inform her tragically that it was
lost; she who saw to it that his meals were not forgotten in the
exigencies of his parish work, and who supervised his outward man to
the last detail--otherwise, in one of his frequent fits of
absent-mindedness, he would have been quite capable of presenting
himself at church in the identical grey tweeds he was now wearing.

Yet notwithstanding the irrepressible note of youth about him, which
called forth a species of "mothering" from every woman of his
acquaintance, Alan Stair was a man to whom people instinctively turned
for counsel. A child in the material things of this world, he was a
giant in spiritual development--broad-minded and tolerant, his religion