A peep at the family as on the day of his expected arrival from Paris they sat waiting for him will enlighten us somewhat.  Taken as a whole, it was a very pleasant family group, which sat there waiting for the foreign lion, waiting for the whistle of the engine which was to herald his approach.

“I wonder if he has changed,” said the mother, glancing at the opposite mirror and arranging the puffs of glossy false hair which shaded her aristocratic forehead.

“Of course he has changed somewhat,” returned Miss Asenath, rubbing together her white, bony hands, on one of which a costly diamond was flashing.  “Nearly two years of Paris society must have imparted to him that air distingue so desirable in a young man who has traveled.”

“He’ll hardly fail of making a good match now,” Miss Eudora remarked, caressing the pet spaniel which had climbed into her lap.  “I think we must manage to visit Saratoga or some of those places next summer.  Mr. Gardner found his wife at Newport, and they say she’s worth half a million.”

“But horridly ugly,” and Anna looked up from the reverie in which she had been indulging.  “Lottie says she has tow hair and a face like a fish.  John would never be happy with such a wife.”

“Possibly you think he had better have married that sewing girl about whom he wrote us just before going to Europe,” Miss Eudora said spitefully, pinching the long silken ears of her pet until the animal yelled with pain.

There was a faint sigh from the direction of Anna’s chair, and all knew she was thinking of the missionary.  The mother continued: 

“I trust he is over that fancy, and ready to thank me for the strong letter I wrote him.”

“Yes, but the girl,” and Anna leaned her white cheek in her whiter hand.  “None of us know the harm his leaving her may have done.  Don’t you remember he wrote how much she loved him—­how gentle and confiding her nature was, and how to leave her then might prove her ruin?”

“Our little Anna is growing very eloquent upon the subject of sewing girls,” Miss Asenath said, rather scornfully, and Anna rejoined: 

“I am not sure she was a sewing girl.  He spoke of her as a schoolgirl.”

“But it is most likely he did that to mislead us,” said the mother.  “The only boarding school he knows anything about is the one where Lottie was.  If he were not her uncle by marriage I should not object to Lottie as a daughter,” was the next remark, whereupon there ensued a conversation touching the merits and demerits of a certain Lottie Gardner, whose father had taken for a second wife Miss Laura Richards.