“I understand,” he whispered, and led her away down the hall, that she might recover the poise the singing of the old song had shaken.

“They must have been here often when we children were little,” she murmured, pausing by the open door under the staircase, which led to a side porch.  Just here she was hidden from the rest.

“I’m sure they were.  I remember driving out here once with your father, and seeing him sit in front of that hall fireplace with your Uncle Maxwell, talking business.  They were here more, I imagine, when you were very small, than afterward, when you were old enough to remember.”

“They’ve been here,” said Sally softly.  “They’ve walked about these old floors and looked out of these windows.  That makes it home to me.  And if I can only make it home to the others—­”

“You couldn’t help making it home—­anywhere.”

“Oh, Jarvis, you’re such a good friend!—­I keep telling you that, till you must be tired of hearing it.”

“I’m not tired of hearing it.”

There followed an eloquent little silence, during which Jarvis took the girl’s hand in both his own and held it close in a way which meant to her the comprehending sympathy with all her joys and sorrows which he had long given her.  To him it meant so much more that he dared not give expression to it in any but this mute fashion.  But his heart beat high with longing and with hope, though he was firmly bidding himself wait—­and wait a long time yet before he put his fortune to the touch, “to win or lose it all!”

Then Sally wiped her eyes, put her handkerchief away, and faced about.

“Now I can go back,” she said.  “Thank you for giving me a chance to put Sally Lunn in order.  The mistress of a mansion like this must always have herself in hand, mustn’t she?”

Standing on her own hearth-stone, Sally said good-night to all her guests like the grand lady she gayly affected to be.  But like the girl she was, she ran after them to wave her hand at them from the big porch, crying, “Come again—­please all do come again—­oh, very soon!”

PART TWO

THE LANES AND THE ACRES

CHAPTER XI

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

“Well, here he comes,” announced Maxwell Lane.  With his hands in his pockets he was standing by a window which commanded a view of the gateway and approach to the house.  “He ’phoned me this morning he’d be out—­loaded for bear.  I’ll wager if he has one treatise on farming in that cutter he has forty.”

Sally ran to look.  “I don’t see anything unusual,” said she, her eyes on the trim sleigh drawn by a pair of fine grays, the driver waving an arm at the window as he caught sight of the faces thereat.  “Expect to see horse-hoes and threshing machines sticking out from under his furs?  Jolly!—­that’s a magnificent fox-skin robe he has over his knees.  Looks like a farmer, doesn’t he, now?  Think a fellow in a silk-lined overcoat and driving-gloves like those knows anything about farming?—­Or ever can know?” he added skeptically.