His long, gaunt body lay relaxed and inert upon the leather cushions, and his knotted, bony hands--the hands of a scholar and a thinker--were stretched, palms downward, on the rolled arms of his chair.

There was nothing in his appearance--nothing in his worn, humorous face under the thin brown hair, to suggest the valiant lover, the impressionable dreamer.

Yet in the innermost truth of his own nature he was both, and his grief, of which in his strange, almost savage, reserve he had never spoken even to his wife, had softened gradually into the gentlest of his dreams as well as the profoundest of his regrets.

"The little chap," as he always called the child, in his thoughts, had grown for him into an individuality which for all its nearness was yet clearly distinct from his own.

Adams had lived day by day with him, had sat face to face with him in his lamp-lighted room, had carried him successfully through the first childish books that he might have studied, had even launched him into the Latin he might have learned.