She stood by and looked on while he did it.  Surely, he had grown and matured in the three broadening years!  There was conscious manhood, effectiveness, in every movement; in the very bigness of him.  She had a little attack of patriotism, saying to herself that they did not fashion such young men in the Old World—­could not, perhaps.

Mammy Juliet’s grandson, Pete, was down with the family carriage, and he took his orders from Tom touching the bestowal of the luggage as he would have taken them from Major Dabney.  Ardea marked this, too, and being Southern bred, wrote the Gordon name still a little higher on the scroll of esteem.  Pete’s respectful obedience was, in its way, a patent of nobility.  The negro house-servant, to the manner born, draws the line sharply between gentle and simple and is swift to resent interlopings.

When Pete had done his office with the European gatherings of the party the ancient carriage looked like a van, and there was scant room inside for three passengers.

“That means us for old Longfellow and the buggy,” said Tom to Ardea.  “Do you mind?  Longfellow is fearfully and wonderfully slow, same as ever, but he’s reasonably sure.”

“Any way,” said Ardea; so he put her into the buggy and they drew in behind the carriage.  Before they were half-way to the iron-works they had the pike to themselves, and Tom was not urging the leisurely horse.

“My land! but it’s good for tired eyes to have another sight of you!” he declared, applying the remedy till she laughed and blushed a little.  Then:  “It has been a full month of Sundays.  Do you realize that?”

“Since we saw each other?  It has been much longer than that, hasn’t it?”

“Not so very much.  I saw you in New York the day you sailed.”

“You did!  Where was I?”

“You had just come down in the elevator at the hotel with your grandfather and Miss Euphrasia.”

“And you wouldn’t stop to speak to us?  I think that was simply barbarous!”

“Wasn’t it?” he laughed.  “But the time was horribly unpropitious.”

“Why?”

He looked at her quizzically.

“I’m wondering whether I’d better lie out of it; say I knew you were on your way to breakfast, and that I hoped to have a later opportunity, and all that.  Shall I do it?”

She did not reply at once.  The undeceived inner self was telling her that here lay the parting of the ways; that on her answer would be built the structure, formal or confidential, of their future intercourse.  Loyalty to the halo demanded self-restraint; but every other fiber of her was reaching out for a reestablishment of the old boy-and-girl openness of heart and mind.  Her hesitation was only momentary.

“You are just as rude and Gothic as you used to be, aren’t you, Tom?  Don’t you know, I’m childishly glad of it; I was afraid you might be changed in that way, too,—­and I don’t want to find anything changed.  You needn’t be polite at the expense of truth—­not with me.”