sick, the saddest possible contrast to the airy, engaging master of the Kiteroa revels. Dicky, it appeared, had found him at the hotel in Appleby, with his credit exhausted, and had brought him away by main force. Alas for merry Martin! The real superiority of Kiteroa air for him over that of town depended, it was obvious, upon its greater distance from a bar.
Poor Martin! And the poor Callenders! They nursed and tended him unreproachfully till he was fully himself again, and then Roger talked to him like a man, and Mrs. Callender like a mother. And Martin, true to his lightly hung, easily moved nature, responded to this generous treatment with the utmost readiness. The vituperations that they spared him he heaped on his own head. He swore that he should never forgive himself for having so disgraced, so hurt, such friends. He confessed, with a shame-faced sincerity, that took half the ugliness out of the confession, and disposed its hearers rather to sympathy than blame, that he could not honestly say this was the first time he had so fallen; but he could, and he did, most vehemently vow that it should be the last. It was not, however—neither was the next time, nor the next. Poor Mrs. Callender was a woman much to be pitied in those dark days. She was at her wits’ end, when Avis le Beau came to the rescue. She married him.
Avis was a practical, capable, resolute girl, her own mistress since the death of her father, and in possession of her own farm. If, as was whispered round Kiteroa, it was really she who proposed the match, that only showed that she had enough sense to see what Martin needed, and enough love
