When they reached Boston, Harwood took Sylvia and her companions to luncheon at the Touraine and put them on their train for Wellesley.  His thoughtfulness and efficiency could not fail to impress the young women.  He was an admirable cavalier, and Sylvia’s companions were delighted with him.  He threatened them with an early visit to college, suggesting the most daring possibilities as to his appearance.  He repeated, at Sylvia’s instigation, the incident of the hearse horses at Poughkeepsie, with new flourishes, and cheerfully proposed a cousinship to all of them.

“Or, perhaps,” he said, when he had found seats for them and had been admonished to leave, “perhaps it would be more in keeping with my great age to become your uncle.  Then you would be cousins to each other and we should all be related.”

Speculations as to whether he would ever come kept the young women laughing as they discussed him.  They declared that the meeting on the train had been by ulterior design and they quite exhausted the fun of it upon Sylvia, who gained greatly in importance through the encounter with Harwood.  She was not the demure young person they had thought her; it was not every girl who could produce a personable young man on a railway journey.

Sylvia wondered much about Marian and dramatized to herself the girl’s arrival at college.  It did not seem credible that Mrs. Bassett was preparing Marian for college because she, Sylvia Garrison, was enrolled there.  Sylvia was kindly disposed toward all the world, and she resented Harwood’s insinuations.  As for Mrs. Owen and Dan’s intimations that Marian must be educated to satisfy the great aunt’s ideals as represented in Sylvia—­well, Sylvia had no patience whatever with any such idea.

CHAPTER XIII

THE WAYS OF MARIAN

The historian may not always wait for the last grain of sand to mark the passing of an hour; he must hasten the flight of time frequently by abrupt reversals of the glass.  Much competent evidence (to borrow from the lawyers) we must reject as irrelevant or immaterial to our main issue.  Harwood was admitted to practice in the United States courts midway of his third year in Bassett’s office.  The doors of the state courts swing inward to any Hoosier citizen of good moral character who wants to practice law,—­a drollery of the Hoosier constitution still tolerated.  The humor of being a mere “constitutional” lawyer did not appeal to Harwood, who revered the traditions and the great names of his chosen profession, and he had first written his name on the rolls of the United States District Court.