The Turn of the Tide by Fred M. White — Read

It was half an hour or so later when Gilmour came out of the library, having finished his work with Croot, and crossed the hall with the intention of going upstairs to his room. He was frequently down there at the Moat House, where sometimes he had to stay late, and therefore a bedroom was always at his disposal. Here he kept the necessary change, and a spare set of shaving tackle, in fact, he was quite at home in the house. He would have gone up to his room moodily enough now had he not noticed that a light was still burning in the drawing-room, and as he glanced into the open door he had a glimpse of Vera, standing there in front of the great carved fire-place. Her little slippered foot was on the curb, and she was looking dreamily into the soft blaze made by the wood fire, and it seemed to Gilmour as if in some way she was the spirit of the place. In that great dim room, with its sombre walls and warm brown colouring, she might have been born and bred there, so perfectly did she fit in with the picture. And yet Gilmour knew but too well that Vera had been the only child of a man who had gone out seeking his fortune in Canada over twenty years before, taking his delicate pretty little wife with him.

He had been a failure from the start, and the last man in the world who ought to have attempted a life of that sort. Out there his wife had pined and died in those harsh rude surroundings, leaving Vera on the hapless man's hands. And in time he had followed his wife over the borderland and, in a passing spasm of pity, Croot had adopted Vera.