In Joan, Mrs. Tweksbury saw resemblance to no one she remembered, so she concluded she must be like the father, physically, whom they must all ignore absolutely.  Try as she valiantly did, the old lady felt her quick-beating heart falter before Joan’s earnest, searching gaze.  It was a relief to turn to Nancy and permit her eyes to dim and soften.

“My dear, my dear,” she said to Doris, “how like dear Merry the baby is!  Just so, I recall—­”

Doris’s face grew strained and ashy.  “Please,” she implored, “please, Aunt Emily—­don’t!”

“Of course, of course, my child.  Very indiscreet of me—­but I was taken off my guard.”  Then—­“My dears, will you kiss me?” This to the children keeping their courage up by clinging together.

“No,” Joan replied in a tone entirely free from bad manners but weighted with simple truth; “Joan likes to kiss Auntie Dorrie.”  The inference stiffened Mrs. Tweksbury and caused Doris a qualm.

“And you?” The old lady’s tone was pathetic in its appeal to Nancy—­her “intuition” was at stake.

Nancy drew nearer.  She was fascinated, afraid, but guided by a strange impulse.  “Nancy will,” she panted, “Nancy will kiss you—­two times!”

Mrs. Tweksbury’s breath caught in her throat—­she strangled but controlled herself and bent as a queen might to the sweet uplifted face at her knee.

After that visit Doris would have had a difficult task in stemming a flood that Mrs. Tweksbury directed, having removed the dam.  While she fairly grovelled, emotionally, before Nancy, the old lady defended Joan by stern insistence upon traits of nobility unsuspected by others in the child.

“The wretch of a father,” she mentally vowed, “shall not have the child if suggestion can prevent.”

Spiritually she fell in line with Doris, and where Mrs. Tweksbury led it were wiser and easier to follow than to blaze new trails.

The second event that marked a new epoch was the coming of George Thornton to claim his own.

CHAPTER V

“And when it fails, fight as we will, we die.”

George Thornton was a man who believed, or thought he did, in two controlling things in life:  Intellect, and the training of intellect, by education and stern attention, to the task at stake.

He had intellect and he had devoted himself to his task, that of worldly success, but he had never recognized nor admitted the necessity of the spiritual in his development, and so it had failed him—­and, in a deep, tragic way, he was dying.  Had been dying through the years since his devil took the reins, in a mad hour, and rode him.

There had been weeks and months after his leaving Meredith when his soul cried aloud to him but was smothered.  He would not heed.  He let business and coarse, pleasurable excitement gain power over him, and when they lagged he drank his conscience to sleep.