Then she proceeded to lay the table for supper, as they usually dined in the middle of the day.  Dorothy’s feet were more active then, and Archie preferred an early dinner.  Everything was in readiness at last; the bread and the butter and the jam, with cold chicken and ham, and the kettle singing on the hearth; the curtains drawn and the bright fire making shadows on the wall and falling upon the young girl, who, as her ear caught the sound of footsteps without, ran to the window, and parting the heavy curtains, looked out into the darkness so that the first glimpse Grey Jerrold had of her was of her fair, eager face framed in waves of golden brown hair, and pressed against the window pane in the vain effort to see the dreaded American.

CHAPTER X.

GREY.

Between the man of twenty-three and the boy of fourteen, who had knelt upon the snow in the leafless woods and asked God to forgive him for his grandfather’s sin, and had pledged himself to undo as far as was possible the wrong to others that sin had caused, there was the difference of nine years of growth, and culture, and experience, and knowledge of the world; but otherwise the boy and the man were the same, for as the Grey of fourteen had been frank, and truthful, and generous, and wholly unselfish, with a gentleness in his nature like that of a tender, loving woman, so was the Grey of twenty-three whom we last saw upon the steamer which was taking him away from home and the lonely woman watching so tearfully upon the wharf, and feeling that with his going her joyless life was made more desolate.

Since that time there had been a year’s travel upon the Continent with his parents, and then he had entered at Eton, where he renewed his acquaintance with Neil McPherson, between whom and himself there sprung up a friendship which nothing had weakened as yet.  Several times he had been a guest in Neil’s home, where Lady Jane treated him with the utmost civility, and admitted that for an American he really was refined and gentlemanly.  He knew Jack Trevellian, and Blanche, and all Neil’s intimate friends, and had the entree to the same society with them, whenever he chose to avail himself of it, which was not very often.  He was in Europe for study, he said, and not for society, and he devoted himself to his books with an energy and will which put him at the head of his class in Eton, and won him an enviable reputation for scholarship at Oxford, where he had now been for nearly four years, and where he intended to remain until his Aunt Lucy, and possibly his Aunt Hannah, crossed the sea and joined him for an extended tour.