An unfeeling giggle from above was the only answer, and the Reverend Alan made his way into the house, pausing to sling his bath-towel picturesquely over one of the pegs of the hat-stand as he passed through the hall.

He was incurably disorderly, and only the strenuous efforts of his daughter Joan kept the habit within bounds.  Since the death of her mother, nearly ten years ago, she had striven to fill her place and to be to this lovable, grown-up boy who was her father all that his adored young wife had been.  And so far as material matters were concerned, she had succeeded.  She it was who usually found the MS. of his sermon when, just as the bells were calling to service, he would come leaping up the stairs, three at a time, to inform her tragically that it was lost; she who saw to it that his meals were not forgotten in the exigencies of his parish work, and who supervised his outward man to the last detail—­otherwise, in one of his frequent fits of absent-mindedness, he would have been quite capable of presenting himself at church in the identical grey tweeds he was now wearing.

Yet notwithstanding the irrepressible note of youth about him, which called forth a species of “mothering” from every woman of his acquaintance, Alan Stair was a man to whom people instinctively turned for counsel.  A child in the material things of this world, he was a giant in spiritual development—­broad-minded and tolerant, his religion spiced with a sense of humour and deepened by a sympathetic understanding of frail human nature.  And it was to him that Ralph Quentin, when on his death-bed, had confided the care of his motherless little daughter, Diana, appointing him her sole guardian and trustee.

The two men had been friends from boyhood, and perhaps no one had better understood than Ralph, who had earlier suffered a similar loss, the terrible blank which the death of his wife had occasioned in Stair’s life.  The fellowship of suffering had drawn the two men together in a way that nothing else could have done, so that when Quentin made known his final wishes concerning his daughter, Alan Stair had gladly accepted the charge laid upon him, and Diana, then a child of ten, had made her permanent home at Crailing Rectory, speedily coming to look upon her guardian as a beloved elder brother, and upon his daughter, who was but two years her senior, as her greatest friend.

From the point of view of the Stairs themselves, the arrangement was not without its material advantages.  Diana had inherited three hundred a year of her own, and the sum she contributed to “cover the cost of her upkeep,” as she laughingly termed it when she was old enough to understand financial matters, was a very welcome addition to the slender resources provided by the value of the living.

But even had the circumstances been quite other than they were, so that the fulfilment of Ralph Quentin’s last behest, instead of being an assistance to the household exchequer, had proved to be a drain upon it, Alan Stair would have acted in precisely the same way—­for the simple reason that there was never any limit to his large conception of the meaning of the word friendship and of its liabilities.