At last Ross came, but without sending Adelaide word.  His telegram to his mother gave just time for a trap to meet him at the station.  As he was ascending the broad, stone approaches of the main entrance to the house at Point Helen, she appeared in the doorway, her face really beautiful with mother-pride.  For Janet she cared as it is the duty of parent to care for child; Ross she loved.  It was not mere maternal imagination that made her so proud of him; he was a distinguished and attractive figure of the kind that dominates the crowds at football games, polo and tennis matches, summer resort dances, and all those events which gather together the youth of our prosperous classes.  Of the medium height, with a strong look about the shoulders, with sufficiently, though not aggressively, positive features and a clear skin, with gray-green eyes, good teeth, and a pleasing expression, he had an excellent natural basis on which to build himself into a particularly engaging and plausible type of fashionable gentleman.  He was in traveling tweeds of pronounced plaid which, however, he carried off without vulgarity.  His trousers were rolled high, after the fashion of the day, to show dark red socks of the same color as his tie and of a shade harmonious to the stripe in the pattern of shirt and suit and to the stones in his cuff links.  He looked clean, with the cleanness of a tree after the measureless drenching of a storm; he had a careless, easy air, which completely concealed his assiduous and self-complacent self-consciousness.  He embraced his mother with enthusiasm.

“How well you look!” he exclaimed; then, with a glance round, “How well everything looks!”

His mother held tightly to his arm as they went into the house; she seemed elder sister rather than mother, and he delighted her by telling her so—­omitting the qualifying adjective before the sister.  “But you’re not a bit glad to see me,” he went on.  “I believe you don’t want me to come.”

“I’m just a little cross with you for not answering my letters,” replied she.

“How is Del?” he asked, and for an instant he looked embarrassed and curiously ashamed of himself.

“Adelaide is very well,” was her reply in a constrained voice.

“I couldn’t stay away any longer,” said he.  “It was tiresome up at Windrift.”

He saw her disappointment, and a smile flitted over his face which returned and remained when she said:  “I thought you were finding Theresa Howland interesting.”

“Oh, you did?” was his smiling reply.  “And why?”

“Then you have come because you were bored?” she said, evading.

“And to see you and Adelaide.  I must telephone her right away.”

It seemed to be secretly amusing him to note how downcast she was by this enthusiasm for Adelaide.  “I shouldn’t be too eager,” counseled she.  “A man ought never to show eagerness with a woman.  Let the women make the advances, Ross.  They’ll do it fast enough—­when they find that they must.”