No child had ever before had any part in the shy man's dream life.

But that night in the twilight the vision of the rocking-chair was a girl in a blue print dress, with a little, golden-haired shape at her knee--a shape that lisped and prattled and called her "mother;" and both of them were his.
It was the next day that he failed for the first time to put flowers in the west gable.

Instead, he cut a loose handful of daffodils and, looking furtively about him as if committing a crime, he laid them across the footpath under the pine.

She must pass that way; her feet would crush them if she failed to see them.

Then he slipped back into his garden, half exultant, half repentant.