tiding-over, after careful consideration of needs and opportunities,
coupled with a reasonable expectation of repayment; cheerfully taking any
security at hand, taking the security of character as cheerfully when he
felt himself justified; in good time exacting his dues to the last
penny--still cheerfully. Not heartless, either; in cases of extreme
distress--more than once or twice--McClintock had both written off the
obligation and added to it something for the day's need, in a grim but
not unkindly fashion; always under seal of secrecy. No extortioner, this;
a dry, passionless, pertinacious man.

McClintock bought the Mitchell House in the seventies--boys still
continuing to be boyish--and there, a decade later, his wife died,
childless.

McClintock disposed of his takings unobserved, holding Mitchell House
only, and slipped away to New York or elsewhere. The rents of Mitchell
House were absorbed by a shadowy, almost mythical agent, whose name
you always forgot until you hunted up the spidery signature on the
receipts given by the bank for your rent money.

Except for a curious circumstance connected with Mitchell House,
McClintock had been quite forgotten of Vesper and Abingdon. The great
house was much in demand as a summer residence; those old oak-walled
rooms were spacious and comfortable, if not artistic; the house was
admirably kept up. It was in the most desirable neighborhood; there was
fishing and boating; the situation was "sightly." We borrow the last word
from the hill folk, the presentee landlords; the producers, or, to put
it quite bluntly, the workers.

As the years slipped by, it crept into common knowledge that not every