Margaret came to Brandon at the beginning of June, just at the season when the region was at its loveliest, and just when its society was making preparations to get away from it to the sea, or the mountains, or to any place that was not home.  I could never understand why a people who have been grumbling about snow and frost for six months, and longing for genial weather, should flee from it as soon as it comes.  I had made the discovery, quite by chance—­and it was so novel that I might have taken out a patent on it—­that if one has a comfortable home in our northern latitude, he cannot do better than to stay in it when the hum of the mosquito is heard in the land, and the mercury is racing up and down the scale between fifty and ninety.  This opinion, however, did not extend beyond our little neighborhood, and we may be said to have had the summer to ourselves.

I fancied that the neighborhood had not changed, but the coming of Margaret showed me that this was a delusion.  No one can keep in the same place in life simply by standing still, and the events of the past two years had wrought a subtle change in our quiet.  Nothing had been changed to the eye, yet something had been taken away, or something had been added, a door had been opened into the world.  Margaret had come home, yet I fancied it was not the home to her that she had been thinking about.  Had she changed?

She was more beautiful.  She had the air—­I should hesitate to call it that of the fine lady—­of assured position, something the manner of that greater world in which the possession of wealth has supreme importance, but it was scarcely a change of manner so much as of ideas about life and of the things valuable in it gradually showing itself.  Her delight at being again with her old friends was perfectly genuine, and she had never appeared more unselfish or more affectionate.  If there was a subtle difference, it might very well be in us, though I found it impossible to conceive of her in her former role of teacher and simple maiden, with her heart in the little concerns of our daily life.  And why should she be expected to go back to that stage?  Must we not all live our lives?  Miss Forsythe’s solicitude about Margaret was mingled with a curious deference, as to one who had a larger experience of life than her own.  The girl of a year ago was now the married woman, and was invested with something of the dignity that Miss Forsythe in her pure imagination attached to that position.  Without yielding any of her opinions, this idea somehow changed her relations to Margaret; a little, I thought, to the amusement of Mrs. Fletcher and the other ladies, to whom marriage took on a less mysterious aspect.  It arose doubtless from a renewed sense of the incompleteness of her single life, long as it had been, and enriched as it was by observation.