charm of sheer sweetness, for he never seemed to be particularly anxious to please.  Barry was very gallant, in an impersonal sort of way:  he took a keen, elder-brotherly sort of interest in every pretty girl in the village, and liked to discuss their own love affairs with them, with a seriousness quite paternal.  He never singled any girl out for particular attention, or escorted one unless asked, but he was flatteringly attentive to all the middle-aged people of his acquaintance and his big helpful hand was always ready for stumbling old women on the church steps, or tearful waifs in the street—­he always had time to listen to other people’s troubles.  Barry—­ everyone admitted—­had his points.  But after all—­

After all, he was lazy, and shiftless, and unambitious:  he was content to be assistant editor of the Mail; content to be bullied and belittled by old Rogers; content to go on his own idle, sunny way, playing with his small, chubby son, foraging the woods with a dozen small boys at his heels, working patiently over a broken gopher-trap or a rusty shotgun, for some small admirer.  Worst of all, Barry had been intemperate, years ago, and there were people who believed that his occasional visits to San Francisco, now, were merely excuses for revels with his old newspaper friends there.

And yet, he had been such a brilliant, such a fiery and ambitious boy!  All Santa Paloma had taken pride in the fact that Barry Valentine, only twenty, had been offered the editorship of the one newspaper of Plumas, a little town some twelve miles away, and had prophesied a triumphant progress for him, to the newspapers of San Francisco, of Chicago, of New York!  But Barry had not been long in Plumas when he suddenly married Miss Hetty Scott of that town, and in the twelve years that had passed since then the golden dreams for his future had vanished one by one, until to-day found him with no one to believe in him—­not even himself.

Hetty Scott was but seventeen when Barry met her, and already the winner in two village contests for beauty and popularity.  After their marriage she and Barry went to San Francisco, and shrewd, little, beautiful Hetty found herself more admired than ever, and began to talk of the stage.  After that, Santa Paloma heard only occasional rumors:  Barry had a position on a New York paper, and Hetty was studying in a dramatic school; there was a baby; there were financial troubles, and Barry was drinking again; then Hetty was dead, and Barry, fearing the severe eastern winters for the delicate baby, was coming back to Santa Paloma.  So back they came, and there had been no indication since, that the restless, ambitious Barry of years ago was not dead forever.

“No smoking?” said Barry now, good-naturedly.  “That’s so; you’ve got some sort of ‘High Jinks’ on for to-night, haven’t you?  I brought up those hinges for your mixing table, Jen,” he went on, “but any time will do.  I suppose the kitchen is right on the fault, as it were.”