“Yes, every time, Miss Carroll, if he will do me the honor to let me call him one.  Mr. Anderson is a mighty fine gentleman.”

The girl’s voice said something in response with a slightly abashed but still jibing inflection, but Anderson could not catch it.  They passed out of sight, the cigar-smoke lingering in their wake.  Anderson inhaled it with no longer any feeling of disapprobation.  He slowly lit a cigar himself, and smoked and meditated.  The presence on the step above him was for the time dispelled by her own materiality.  The dream eluded the substance.  Anderson thought of the young man who had walked past with a curious feeling of something akin to gratitude.  “Frank Eastman is a fine young fellow,” he thought.  He had known him ever since he had been a child.  He had been one of the boys whom everybody knew and liked.  He had grown up a village favorite.  The thought flashed through Anderson’s mind that here was a possible husband for Charlotte, and probably a good husband.

“He is an only son,” he told himself; “he will have a little money.  He is as good as and better than young men average, and he is charming, a man to attract any girl.”

Anderson, when he had finished his cigar and one more, and had gone into the house to read a little before going to bed, quite decided that Charlotte Carroll was to marry young Frank Eastman.  He walked remorselessly over the step where his fancy had placed her, and when he glanced at her pretty little nook in the sitting-room, as he passed through with his lamp and his book, it was vacant.  Anderson felt a rigid acquiescence, and read his book with interest until after midnight.

In the mean time Charlotte, her sister Ina, and young Eastman sauntered slowly along through the shadowy streets of Banbridge.  The girls held up their white gowns over their lace petticoats.  They wore no hats, and their pretty, soft, dark locks floated like mist around their faces.  The young man pressed Ina’s arm as closely and lovingly as he dared.  He was yet young enough and innocent enough to be in his heart of hearts as afraid of a girl as, when a child, he had been afraid of his mother.  He thought Ina Carroll something wonderful; Charlotte he scarcely thought of at all except with vague approbation because she was Ina’s sister.  He took the girls into Andrew Drew’s drug store for ice-cream soda.  He watched, with happy proprietorship, the girls dally daintily with the long spoons in the sweet, cold mixture.  Seen in the electric light of the store, they had a bewildering and fairly dazzling splendor of youth and bloom.  Their faces, freshened to exquisite tints by the damp night air, shone forth from the floating film of dark hair with the unquestioning delight of the passing moment.  There was in these young faces at the moment no shadow of the past or future.  They were pure light.  Young Eastman, eating his ice-cream, looked over his glass at Ina Carroll and realized the dazzle of her in his soul.  She felt his look and smiled at him pleasantly, yet with a certain gay defiance.  Charlotte caught both looks.  She stirred her ice-cream briskly into the liquid and drank it.