Having set in motion the coming guest, he believed firmly that an
unfaltering Fate would direct his footsteps safely to Delphi. Cassius Cato
Peabody had been peculiar all his life. He had been a peculiar boy,
unsettled, studious, impractical. Miss Daphne was his younger sister, and
ever since her girlhood had tried to give him all the love and
encouragement that others refused. She had trotted after him faithfully
and happily on all of his exploring expeditions. Perhaps one reason why
these had been so successful was because somehow she had always managed to
surround him with home comforts, even in the wilds of the upper Nile. The
Dean had had his regular meals and clean changes of clothing in the shadow
of Nineveh's ruins in far Chaldea, just as though he had been in his own
domicile.

And perhaps the quaintest thing about it all was that Miss Daphne herself,
no matter on what particular point of the globe she had happened to pitch
her tent, had always retained her courage, although she had faced dangers
that the average woman would have fled from. Perhaps she carried in her
heart an unfailing faith that Providence could not deny her protection
when she was enabling the Dean to give the benefit of his great gifts to
the world.

Their house stood on the same hill as Hope College, the highest point in
the rising ridge of bluffs along the Lake Shore at Delphi. It was built of
dark red brick, a square double edifice, with long French windows and two
rotunda shaped wings, somewhat in the French style. A grove of pine trees
almost hid it from view on its street side, the stately Norway pines that
Kit always loved. The back of the house looked directly out over the lake,
and the land here was frankly left to nature. Trees, grass and underbrush
rioted at will, until they suddenly ended on the brow of the bluff, where
there was a sheer declivity of sand to the beach. Looking at it from