Ian’s queries have brought up a subject that has deluded and eluded my hopes all summer, and has finally ended in the people that I hoped would drift through the doorway of one of my most substantial air castles refusing so to do, or else being too blind to see the open door.

Martin and Lavinia are the best possible friends, have been constantly in each other’s society, see from nearly the same point of view, and both agree and disagree upon the same subjects, but they have not settled the question of loneliness of living as I hoped, by making the companionship permanent, via matrimony.

Of course, I did not expect them to fall in love exactly as Evan and I or Horace and Sylvia did—­that belongs to spring and summer; still, I thought that when they started worm-hunting together, and played checkers every evening, that they were beginning to find each other mutually indispensable, at least.

But no.  Martin stored away his papers in the old desk, and went to New York a week ago to see several suites of bachelor apartments that had been offered him.

He writes this morning that he has found one to his liking, and will return to-night, if he may, and stay over to-morrow to pack his things.  Meanwhile Miss Lavinia has sent her maids to clean and open her house in “Greenwich Village,” and will go home on Monday, spending her final Sunday with me.  Josephus went with the maids; the country had a demoralizing effect upon him.

Miss Lavinia has been agitating moving uptown, several of her friends at the Bluffs insisting that an apartment near the Park is much more suitable for her than the little house so far from the social centre, saying it is no wonder she is lonely and out of things; but yesterday she told me that she had abandoned the idea of change, and had sent orders to have her old back yard garden dismantled and the whole plot paved, as it was now only a suitable place for drying clothes.  Also that she had written to ask her father’s cousin Lydia, whose Staten Island home had been built in by progress, very much like her own garden, to come to pass the winter with her; and, lest she should repent of so rash an act, she had given the letter to Evan before the ink was fairly dry, as he passed the cottage on the way to the train, that he might post it in the city.

One consolation remains to me in the wreck of my romantic hopes for her—­Miss Lavinia has liked our neighbourhood so well that she has taken the Alton cottage that she now occupies on a three years’ lease, and intends living here from May to October.  The rambling garden is full of old-time, hardy plants and roses, and oh, what good times we shall have together there next spring, for of course she will stop with me when she is getting things in order, and I can spare her enough roots and cuttings to fill every spare inch of ground,—­so, with Sylvia at Pine Ridge, what more can I ask?  The strain and hubbub of the Bluffs seems to be quite vanishing from the foreground and merging with the horizon.