The evening passed, not very merrily, but peacefully; the girls, who had heard a good deal of Mr. Roy from David Dalziel, doing their best to be courteous to him, and to amuse his shy little boys.  He did not stay long, evidently having a morbid dread of “intruding,” and his manner was exceedingly reserved, almost awkward sometimes, of which he seemed painfully conscious, apologizing for being “unaccustomed to civilization and to ladies’ society,” having during his life in the bush sometimes passed months at a time without ever seeing a woman’s face.

“And women are your only civilizers,” said he.  “That is why I wish my motherless lads to be taken into this household of yours, Miss Williams, which looks so—­so comfortable,” and he glanced round the pretty parlor with something very like a sigh.  “I hope you will consider the matter, and let me know as soon as you have made up your mind.”

“Which I will do very soon,” she answered.

“Yes, I know you will.  And your decision once made, you never change.”

“Very seldom.  I am not one of those who are ‘given to change.’”

“Nor I.”

He stood a moment, lingering in the pleasant, lightsome warmth, as if loath to quit it, then took his little boys in either hand and went away.  There was a grand consultation that night, for Miss Williams never did any thing without speaking to her girls; but still it was merely nominal.  They always left the decision to her.  And her heart yearned over the two little Roys, orphans, yet children still; while Helen and Janetta were growing up and needing very little from her except a general motherly supervision.  Besides, he asked it.  He had said distinctly that she was the only woman to whom he could thoroughly trust his boys.  So—­she took them.

After a few days the new state of things grew so familiar that it seemed as if it had lasted for months, the young Roys going to and fro to their classes and their golf-playing, just as the young Dalziels had done; and Mr. Roy coming about the house, almost daily, exactly as Robert Roy had used to do of old.  Sometimes it was to Fortune Williams the strangest reflex of former times; only—­with a difference.

Unquestionably he was very much changed.  In outward appearance more even than the time accounted for.  No man can knock about the world, in different lands and climates, for seventeen years, without bearing the marks of it.  Though still under fifty, he had all the air of an “elderly” man, and had grown a little “peculiar” in his ways, his modes of thought and speech—­except that he spoke so very little.  He accounted for this by his long lonely life in Australia, which had produced, he said, an almost unconquerable habit of silence.  Altogether, he was far more of an old bachelor than she was of an old maid, and Fortune felt this:  felt, too, that in spite of her gray hairs she was in reality quite as young as he—­nay, sometimes younger; for her innocent, simple, shut-up life had kept her young.