Finally the question was decided, and the new boarder came, and was duly installed in the family; and thence commenced a new era in Sadie’s life.  Merry clerks and schoolboys she counted among her acquaintances by the score.  Grave, dignified, slightly taciturn men of the Dr. Van Anden stamp she numbered also among her friends; but never one quite like Dr. Douglass.  This easy, graceful, courteous gentleman, who seemed always to have just the right thing to say or do, at just the right moment; who was neither wild nor sober; who seemed the furthest possible remove from wicked, yet who was never by any chance disagreeably good.  His acquaintance with Sadie progressed rapidly.  A new element had come to mix in with her life.  The golden days wherein the two sisters had been much together, wherein the Christian sister might have planted much seed for the Master in Sadie’s bright young heart, had all gone by.  Perchance that sleeping Christian, nestled so cosily among the cushions in Cousin Abbie’s morning-room, might have been startled and aroused, could she have realized that days like those would never come back to her; that being misspent they had passed away; that a new worker had come to drop seed into the unoccupied heart; that never again would Sadie be as fresh, and as guileless, and as easily won, as in those days which she had let slip in idle, aye, worse than idle, slumber.

Sadie sealed and directed a letter to Ester and ran with it down stairs.  Dr. Douglass stood in the doorway, hat in hand.

“Shall I have the pleasure of being your carrier?” he said courteously.

“Do you suppose you are to be trusted?” Sadie questioned, as she quietly deposited the letter in his hat.

“That depends in a great measure on whether you repose trust in me.  The world is safer in general than we are inclined to think it.  Who lives in that little birdsnest of a cottage just across the way?”

“A dear old gentleman, Mr. Vane,” Sadie answered, her voice taking a tender tone, as it always did when any chance word reminded her of Florence.  “That is he standing in the gateway.  Doesn’t he look like a grand old patriarch?”

As they looked Dr. Van Anden drove suddenly from around the corner, and reined in his horses in front of the opposite gateway.  They could hear his words distinctly.

“Mr. Vane, let me advise you to avoid this evening breeze; it is blowing up strongly from the river.”

“Is Dr. Van Anden the old gentleman’s nurse, or guardian, or what?” questioned Sadie’s companion.

“Physician,” was her brief reply.  Then, after a moment, she laughed mischievously.  “You don’t like Dr. Van Anden, Dr. Douglass?”

“I!  Oh, yes, I like him; the trouble is, he doesn’t like me, for which he is not to blame, to be sure.  Probably he can not help it.  I have in some way succeeded in gaining his ill-will.  Why do you think I am not one of his admirers?”