the handsomest of its generation. When Roger Fleming, arrogant, young, rich, had posed for this picture, now a whole third of a century ago, the world had been at his feet.

This

What a different world it had been, mused David; a world without an electric light or bell or street car to disturb it—without a moving picture or an automobile! But Roger Fleming, this exquisite, negligently smiling gentleman pictured with the bay horse and the slim greyhound, had missed none of these things from his crowded life. He had had wealth and beauty, travel, books, he had inherited Wastewater, and women—women had always been but too kind to him!

His first wife, Janet Fleming, the widow of a distant relative, had come first to Wastewater about thirty years before. Janet was then twenty-two, weeping, helpless, alone—unless the four-weeks-old baby in her arms might be considered a companion. This baby had been David himself, fatherless since five months before his birth. Exactly seven weeks after her tearful and black-swathed arrival in the house of her kinsman, Janet, David’s young mother, had married Black Roger Fleming of Wastewater.

[15]There had been quite a houseful of relatives, all more or less distant, there to receive her, for in the comfortable fashion of a past day the rich young heir of Wastewater had felt himself responsible for his less fortunate kin, especially his women kin; and more than that, it had suited his somewhat feudal ideas of hospitality to gather the entire clan about his big dining table.

[15]

So David’s mother had found Roger with a stately, withered little gray-headed second cousin—his uncle’s widowed daughter-in-law—“Aunt John,” keeping house for him, and assisting her a dark-eyed, vivacious daughter named Flora, and a smaller, more delicate, and timid daughter, Lily—third cousins, if relationships were to be traced. And besides these there was Roger’s younger brother, Will, a sweet, idle, endearing ne’er-do-well, who was supposedly studying law with a Boston firm, and who was actually doing nothing at all except enjoy life as an irresponsible junior.

Roger’s marriage made small difference in the others’ lives; David, whose memory began a few years after this, indeed could remember them all, living along comfortably in the big house. He remembered his dark-eyed, animated mother, who shortly after marrying Roger had had another boy baby in her arms; he remembered “Aunt John,” who managed the house and 

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