“Now, you’re going to wipe that horrid frown off your forehead, Daddy,” she would say blithely, if Doctor Toland confessed to a misgiving in the contemplation of any one of his seven, “and stop worrying about Richie!  His bad old hip is going to get well, and he’ll be walking just like any one else in no time!” And in the same tone she said to Barbara:  “I know my darling girl is going to that luncheon, and going to forget that her hat isn’t quite the thing for the occasion,” and said to little Constance, “We’re going to forget that it’s raining, and not think about dismal things any more!” No account of flood or fire or outrage was great enough to win from her more than a rueful smile, a sigh, and a brisk:  “Well, I suppose such things must be, or they wouldn’t be permitted.  Don’t let’s think about it!”

Women who knew Mrs. Toland spoke of her as “wonderful.”  And indeed she was wonderful in many ways, a splendid manager, a delightful hostess, and essentially motherly and domestic in type.  She was always happy and always busy, gathering violets, chaperoning Sally or Barbara at the dentist’s, selecting plaids for the “girlies’” winter suits.  Her married life—­all her life, in fact—­had been singularly free from clouds, and she expected the future to be even brighter, when “splendid, honourable men” should claim her girls, one by one, and all the remembered romance of her youth begin again.  That the men would be forthcoming she did not doubt; had not Fate already delivered Jim Studdiford into her hands for Barbara?

James Studdiford, who had just now finished his course at medical college, was affectionately known to the young Tolands as “Jim,” and stood to them in a relationship peculiarly pleasing to Mrs. Toland.  He was like a brother, and yet, actually, he bore not the faintest real kinship to—­well, to Barbara, for instance.  Years before, twenty years before, to be exact, Doctor Toland, then unmarried, and unacquainted, as it happened, with the lovely Miss Sally Ford, had been engaged to a beautiful young widow, a Mrs. Studdiford, who had been left with a large fortune and a tiny boy some two years before.  This was in Honolulu, where people did a great deal of riding in those days, and it presently befell that the doctor, two weeks before the day that had been set for the wedding, found himself kneeling beside his lovely fiancee on a rocky headland, as she lay broken and gasping where her horse had flung her, and straining to catch the last few agonized words she would ever say: 

“You’ll—­keep Jim—­with you, Robert?”

How Doctor Toland brought the small boy to San Francisco, how he met the dashing and indifferent Sally, and how she came at last to console him for his loss, was another story, one that Mrs. Toland never tired of telling.  Little Jim had his place in their hearts from their wedding day.  Barbara was eleven years old when, with passionate grief, she learned that he was not her half brother, and many casual