As they went out of the garden gate, Cicely said, “You have always been a very independent person and accustomed to doing very much as you please, haven’t you?”

“It has been something like that,” answered Ralph; “but why?”

“Only this,” she said; “would you begin already to chafe and rebel if I were to ask you not to send that telegram?  It would be so much nicer to tell her after she gets back.”

“Chafe!” exclaimed Ralph, “I should think not.  I will do exactly as you wish.”

“You are awfully good,” said Cicely, “but you must agree with me more prudently now that we are out here, and I will not tell mother until Miriam knows.”

A gray old chanticleer, who was leading his hens across the yard, stopped at this moment and looked at Ralph, but it is not certain that he sniffed.

Ralph knew very well when people, coming from Barport, should arrive in Thorbury, but his mind was so occupied that when he went to the barn, he forgot so many things he should have done at the house, and he ran backward and forward so often, and waited so long for an opportunity to say something he had just thought of, to somebody who did not happen to be ready to listen at the precise moment he wished to speak, that he had just stepped into the gig to go to the station for his sister, when Miriam arrived alone in the Bannister carriage.  Not finding anybody at the station to meet her, they had sent her on.

Mrs. Drane was not the liveliest person at the dinner table, and she wondered much how Ralph and Cicely, who had been so extremely sober at breakfast time, should now be so hilarious.  The arrival of Miriam seemed hardly reason enough for such intemperate gayety.

As for Miriam, she overflowed with delight.  The ocean was grand, but Cobhurst was Cobhurst.  “There was nothing better about my trip than the opportunity it gave me of coming back to my home.  I never did that before, you know, my children.”

This she said loftily from her seat at the head of the table.  Dinner was late and lasted long, and Ralph had gone into the room on the lower floor, in which he kept his cigars, and which he called his office, when Miriam followed him.  There was no unencumbered chair, and she seated herself on the edge of the table.

“Ralph,” said she, “I want to say something to you, now, while it is fresh in my mind.  I think we can sometimes understand our affairs better when we go away from them and are not mixed up in them.  I have been thinking a great deal since I have been at Barport about our affairs here, not only as they are but as they may be, and most likely will be, and I have come to the conclusion that some of these days, Ralph, you will want to be married.”

“Do you mean me?” cried Ralph.  “You amaze me!”

“Oh, you are only a man, and you need not be amazed,” said his sister.  “This is the way I have been thinking of it:  if you ever do want to get married, I hope you will not marry Dora Bannister.  I used sometimes to think that that might be a good thing to do, though I changed my mind very often about it, but I do not think so, now, at all.  Dora is an awfully nice girl in ever so many ways, but since I have been at Barport with her, I am positive that I do not want you to marry her.”