Somebody overtook and joined them there,—­somebody in a dark gray suit and bright buttons.

“Why, that,” cried Barbara, all to herself and her uplifted skimmer, looking after them,—­“that must be the brother from West Point the Inglesides expected,—­that young Dakie Thayne!”

It was Dakie Thayne; who, after they had all been introduced and were walking on comfortably together, asked Ruth Holabird if it had not been she who had been expected and wanted so badly last night at Mrs. Marchbanks’s?

[Illustration]

Ruth dropped a little back as she walked with him, at the moment, behind the others, along the path between the chestnut-trees.

“I don’t think they quite expected me.  I told Adelaide I did not think I could come.  I am the youngest, you see,” she said with a smile, “and I don’t go out very much, except with my—­cousins.”

“Your cousins?  I fancied you were all sisters.”

“It is all the same,” said Ruth.  “And that is why I always catch my breath a little before I say ‘cousins.’”

“Couldn’t they come?  What a pity!” pursued this young man, who seemed bent upon driving his questions home.

“O, it wasn’t an invitation, you know.  It wasn’t company.”

“Wasn’t it?”

The inflection was almost imperceptible, and quite unintentional; Dakie Thayne was very polite; but his eyebrows went up a little—­just a line or two—­as he said it, the light beginning to come in upon him.

Dakie had been about in the world somewhat; his two years at West Point were not all his experience; and he knew what queer little wheels were turned sometimes.

He had just come to Z——­ (I must have a letter for my nameless town, and I have gone through the whole alphabet for it, and picked up a crooked stick at last), and the new group of people he had got among interested him.  He liked problems and experiments.  They were what he excelled in at the Military School.  This was his first furlough; and it was since his entrance at the Academy that his brother, Dr. Ingleside, had come to Z——­, to take the vacant practice of an old physician, disabled from continuing it.

Dakie and Leslie Goldthwaite and Mrs. Ingleside were old friends; almost as old as Mrs. Ingleside and the doctor.

Ruth Holabird had a very young girl’s romance of admiration for one older, in her feeling toward Leslie.  She had never known any one just like her; and, in truth, Leslie was different, in some things, from the little world of girls about her.  In the “each and all” of their pretty groupings and pleasant relations she was like a bit of fresh, springing, delicate vine in a bouquet of bright, similarly beautiful flowers; taking little free curves and reaches of her own, just as she had grown; not tied, nor placed, nor constrained; never the central or most brilliant thing; but somehow a kind of life and grace that helped and touched and perfected all.