little, but he was a kind husband and father, giving no one occasion to doubt his devotion to the somewhat uninteresting though eminently domestic lady he had chosen for his second wife, or the three sturdy boys she had borne him. Still, toward Stella, his only daughter, he seemed to hold himself differently, and, although the girl was on excellent terms with her step-mother, her father, was her most intimate friend and was always the recipient of such slight confidences as she had to make. But when Stella came back from New York, although she made an effort to entertain them all, by telling of the sights she had seen and the sounds she had heard, she had no special confidences for her father, although he had a feeling that there was a nameless something about her that had need of explanation. She was more inclined to solitude than before,—spent more time alone in her room, and roaming over the wide fields or along the quiet river-banks with no companionship except her own thoughts,—and seemed somehow to have lost something of the light-heartedness heretofore so characteristic of her. In spite of all this, however, she was more loving to her father than ever, and more ardent in the expression of her affection for him.
"I never mean to leave you while I live again, papa dear," she would say. "I would like to forget that I had ever been away from you or known any other existence than this dear, simple, country life with you and mamma and the boys."
It was a pleasant thing to Dr. Gray to hear these words, for the most of his own life had been spent in the midst of the amusements and advantages of the city, and he sometimes felt that he had been selfish to condemn this young girl to the isolation of her present existence, and he was glad to know she felt it to be no hardship. Dr. Gray had been, up to the last ten years, in circumstances of affluence and ease, and when at about the same time he lost the greater part of his fortune by disastrous investments and his health became seriously impaired, so that a more assiduous devotion to the duties of his profession seemed scarcely feasible, he had invested the remainder of his fortune in a large grazing farm in the West, and taken his family there in the hope of re-establishing his own health and finding a career for his sons. Mrs. Gray, who was one of the women who have no life outside of home, was equally satisfied in all places, and, as the experiment had proved most successful in promoting the doctor's health and there seemed to be a fair field ahead of the boys, the only qualms the good lather had were in regard to Stella. He knew how sweet and love-compelling the girl's nature had been from a child, and he had foreseen that she would grow into a lovely woman, both as to character and appearance, and he thought it his duty to give her what are called
