received a telegram saying that he had a baby of his own. And
I thank God that little Miss Hope is too young to know what an
appalling loss she has suffered. . . .

Perhaps he stayed to dine. Then perhaps the older daughter
was allowed to sit up an extra half-hour so that she could
wait on the table (and though I say it, that shouldn't, she
could do this beautifully, with dignity and without giggling),
and perhaps the dinner was good, or R. H. D. thought it was,
and in that event he must abandon his place and storm the
kitchen to tell the cook all about it. Perhaps the gardener
was taking life easy on the kitchen porch. He, too, came in
for praise. R. H. D. had never seen our Japanese iris so
beautiful; as for his, they wouldn't grow at all. It wasn't
the iris, it was the man behind the iris. And then back he
would come to us, with a wonderful story of his adventures in
the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and leaving behind him a
cook to whom there had been issued a new lease of life, and a
gardener who blushed and smiled in the darkness under the
Actinidia vines.

It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that
he was with us most and we learned to know him best, and that
he and I became dependent upon each other in many ways.

Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very
difficult and complicated. And he who had given so much
friendship to so many people needed a little friendship in
return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a time to live in a
house whose master and mistress loved each other, and where