The girl, plain, awkward, silent, morose, had always adored her father, but she had never known how to approach him.

She was not clever, she had not been able to enter into his life although she would have done anything that he desired of her.

What she had suffered during those early years when, as a little ugly girl, she had watched her brother, accepted, received into the Brotherhood, praised for his wisdom, his intimacy with God, his marvellous saintly promise, praised for these things when she had known all his weaknesses, how he had slipped away to a music-hall when he was only fourteen and smoked and drank there, how he had laughed at Mr.Thurston's dropping of his "h's" or at Miss Avies' prayer meetings! No one ever knew what in those years she had thought of her brother.

Then, after Martin had flung it all away and escaped abroad, she had begun, slowly, painfully, but with dogged persistence, to make herself indispensable to her father; Martin she had put out of her mind.

He would never return, or, at least, the interval of his departure should have been severe enough to separate him for ever from his father ...
In a moment's glance, in a clasp of the hand, in a flash of the eye, she had seen that love leap up in her father's heart as strong as ever it had been.