He pictured John Upham’s house as he found it and as he left it with purest self-gratulation.  He had not gone far before he heard a clamor of childish voices; there were two, but they sounded like a troop.  John Upham’s twin girls broke through the wayside bushes like little wild things.  Their hands were full of withering flowers.  He called them, and bade them be very still when they went home, so as not to waken their mother and the baby, and they hung their heads with bashful assent.  They were pretty children in spite of their soiled frocks, with their little, pink, moist faces and curling crops of yellow hair.

“If you keep still and don’t wake them up, I will bring you both some peppermints when I come to-morrow,” said Jerome.  He had nearly reached the village when he met the two eldest Upham children.  They were boys, the elder twelve, the younger eight, sturdy little fellows, advancing with a swinging trot, one behind the other, both chewing spruce-gum.  They had been in the woods, on their way home, for a supply.  Jerome stopped them, and repeated the charge he had given to the little girls, then kept on.  The bell was ringing for afternoon meeting—­in fact, it was almost done.  Jerome walked faster, for he intended to go.  He drew near the little white-steepled meeting-house standing in its small curve of greensward, with the row of white posts at the side, to which were tied the farmers’ great plough-horses harnessed to covered wagons and dusty chaises, and then he caught a glimpse of something bright, like a moving flower-bush, in the road ahead.  Squire Eben Merritt, his wife, his sister Miss Camilla, and his daughter Lucina, were all on their way to afternoon meeting.

The Squire was with them that day, leaving heroically his trout-pools and his fishing-fields; for was it not his pretty Lucina’s second Sunday only at home, and was he not as eager to be with her as any lover?  Squire Eben had gained perhaps twenty pounds of flesh to his great frame and a slight overcast of gray to his golden beard; otherwise he had not changed in Jerome’s eyes since he was a boy.  The Squire’s wife Abigail, like many a small, dark woman who has never shown in her looks the true heyday of youth, had apparently not aged nor altered at all.  Little and keenly pleasant, like some insignificant but brightly flavored fruit, set about with crisp silk flounced to her trim waist, holding her elbows elegantly aslant under her embroidered silk shawl, her small head gracefully alert in her bright-ribboned bonnet, she stepped beside her great husband, and then came Lucina with Miss Camilla.

Miss Camilla glided along drooping slenderly in black lace and lilac silk, with a great wrought-lace veil flowing like a bride’s over her head, and shading with a black tracery of leaves and flowers her fair faded face; but Jerome saw her no more than he would have seen a shadow beside Lucina.