On the following day, according to a plan that had been worked out between Larry and Miss Sherwood, Joe Ellison appeared at Cedar Crest and was given the assistant gardener’s cottage which stood apart on the bluff some three hundred yards east of the house.  He was a tall, slightly bent, white-haired man, apparently once a man of physical strength and dominance of character and with the outer markings of a gentleman, but now seemingly a mere shadow of the forceful man of his prime.  As a matter of fact, Joe Ellison had barely escaped that greatest of prison scourges, tuberculosis.

The roses were given over to his care.  For a few brief years during the height of his prosperity he had owned a small place in New Jersey and during that period had seemingly been the country gentleman.  Flowers had been his hobby; so that now he could have had no work which would have more suited him than this guardianship of the roses.  For himself he desired no better thing than to spend what remained of his life in this sunlit privacy and communion with growing things.

He gripped Larry’s hand when they were first alone in the little cottage.  “Thanks, Larry; I’ll not forget this,” he said.  He said little else.  He did not refer to his prison life, or what had gone before it.  He had never asked Larry, even while in prison together, about Larry’s previous activities and associates; and he asked no questions now.  Apparently it was the desire of this silent man to have the bones of his own past remain buried, and to leave undisturbed the graves of others’ mistakes.

A retiring, unobtrusive figure, he settled quickly to his work.  He seemed content, even happy; and at times there was a far-away, exultant look in his gray eyes.  Miss Sherwood caught this on several occasions; it puzzled her, and she spoke of it to Larry.  Larry understood what lay behind Joe’s bearing, and since the thing had never been told to him as a secret he retold that portion of Joe’s history he had recited to the Duchess:  of a child who had been brought up among honorable people, protected from the knowledge that her father was a convict—­a child Joe never expected to see and did not even know how to find.

Joe Ellison became a figure that moved Miss Sherwood deeply:  content to busy himself in his earthly obscurity, ever dreaming and gloating over his one great sustaining thought—­that he had given his child the best chance which circumstances permitted; that he had removed himself from his child’s life; that some unknown where out in the world his child was growing to maturity among clean, wholesome people; that he never expected to make himself known to his child.  The situation also moved Larry profoundly whenever he looked at his old friend, merging into a kindly fellowship with the earth.