“It seems much later here, sir, than it does in Boston,” he said, glancing round at the maples, which stood ragged, with half their leaves blown from them.

“Yes; we’re in the hills, and we’re further north,” answered his father.  “There’s Minnie.”

Dan had seen his sister on the verandah, pausing at sight of him, and puzzled to make out who was with her father.  He had an impulse to hail her with a shout, but he could not.  In his last walk with her he had told her that he should never marry, and they had planned to live together.  It was a joke; but now he felt as if he had come to rob her of something, and he walked soberly on with his father.

“Why, Dan, you good-for-nothing fellow!” she called out when he came near enough to be unmistakable, and ran down the steps to kiss him.  “What in the world are you doing here?  When did you come?  Why didn’t you hollo, instead of letting me stand here guessing?  You’re not sick, are you?”

The father got himself indoors unnoticed in the excitement of the brother’s arrival.  This would have been the best moment for Dan to tell his sister of his engagement; he knew it, but he parried her curiosity about his coming; and then his sister Eunice came out, and he could not speak.  They all went together into the house flaming with naphtha gas, and with the steam heat already on, and Dan said he would take his bag to his room, and then come down again.  He knew that he had left them to think that there was something very mysterious in his coming, and while he washed away the grime of his journey he was planning how to appear perfectly natural when he should get back to his sisters.  He recollected that he had not asked either them or his father how his mother was, but it was certainly not because his mind was not full of her.  Alice now seemed very remote from him, further even than his gun, or his boyish collection of moths and butterflies, on which his eye fell in roving about his room.  For a bitter instant it seemed to him as if they were all alike toys, and in a sudden despair he asked himself what had become of his happiness.  It was scarcely half a day since he had parted in transport from Alice.

He made pretexts to keep from returning at once to his sisters, and it was nearly half an hour before he went down to them.  By that time his father was with them in the library, and they were waiting tea for him.

XXIX.

A family of rich people in the country, apart from intellectual interests, is apt to gormandise; and the Maverings always sat down to a luxurious table, which was most abundant and tempting at the meal they called tea, when the invention of the Portuguese man-cook was taxed to supply the demands of appetites at once eager and fastidious.  They prolonged the meal as much as possible in winter, and Dan used to like to get home just in time for tea when he came up from Harvard; it was always very jolly, and he brought