First came Sallie Carruthers, sailing along in the serene way that I remembered to have always thought like a swan in no hurry, and in her hands was a wet box from which rose sterns protruded.

Next in the procession came Aunt Dilsie, huge and black and wheezing, fanning herself with a genteel turkey-tail fan, and carrying a large covered basket.

But the tail-piece of the procession paralyzed all the home-coming emotions that I had expected to be feeling, save that of pure hilarity.  James Hardin was carrying two bubbly, squirmy, tousle-headed babies, on one arm, and a huge suitcase in the other hand, and his gray felt hat set on the back of his shock of black hair at an angle of deep desperation, though patience shone from every line of his strong, gaunt body, and I could see in the half light that there were no lines of irritation about his mouth, which Richard had said looked to him like that of the prophet Hosea, when I had shown him the picture that Father had had snapped of himself and the Crag, with their great string of quail, on one of their hunting-trips, just before Father died.

“Eve!” he exclaimed, when he suddenly caught sight of me, standing in the middle of the dusty road, with my impedimenta around me, and as he spoke he dropped both babies on the platform in a bunch, and the small trunk on the other side.  Then he just stood and looked, and I had to straighten the roar that was arising in me at the sight of him into a conventional smile of greeting, suitable to bestow on an enemy.

But before the smile was well launched, Sallie bustled in and got the full effect of it.

“Why, Evelina Shelby, you darling thing, when did you come?” she fairly bubbled, as she clasped me in the most hospitable of arms, and bestowed a slightly powdery kiss on both my cheeks.  I weakly and femininely enjoyed the hug, not that a man might not have—­Sallie is a dear, and I always did like her gush, shamefacedly.

“She got often that train that left us, and she ain’t got a bit of sense, or she wouldn’t,” answered the Blue Bunch for me, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

“What for did you all unpack outen the surrey, if you sawed the train go by?” she further demanded, with accusing practicality.  “Don’t you know when youse left?”

“Oh, Henrietta,” exclaimed Sallie, looking at the young-philosopher with terrified helplessness.  “Please don’t mind her, Evelina.  I don’t understand her being my child, and nobody does, unless it was Henry’s grandmother on his mother’s side.  You had heard of my loss?”

If I hadn’t heard of the death of Henry Carruthers, Sallie’s elaborate black draperies, relieved by the filmy exquisiteness of white crepe ruches at the neck and wrists, would have proclaimed the fact.

Suddenly, something made me look at Cousin James, as he stood calmly in the midst of Sallie’s family and baggage, both animate and inanimate, and the laugh that had threatened for minutes fairly flared out into his placid, young prophet face.