We are back in Brampton, owning, as we do, an annual pass over the Truro Railroad.  Cynthia has been there all the summer, and as it is now the first of September, her school has begun again.  I do not by any means intend to imply that Brampton is not a pleasant place to spend the summer:  the number of its annual visitors is a refutation of that; but to Cynthia the season had been one of great unhappiness.  Several times Lem Hallowell had stopped the stage in front of Ephraim’s house to beg her to go to Coniston, and Mr. Satterlee had come himself; but she could not have borne to be there without Jethro.  Nor would she go to Boston, though urged by Miss Lucretia; and Mrs. Merrill and the girls had implored her to join them at a seaside place on the Cape.

Cynthia had made a little garden behind Ephraim’s house, and she spent the summer there with her flowers and her books, many of which Lem had fetched from Coniston.  Ephraim loved to sit there of an evening and smoke his pipe and chat with Ezra Graves and the neighbors who dropped in.  Among these were Mr. Gamaliel Ives, who talked literature with Cynthia; and Lucy Baird, his wife, who had taken Cynthia under her wing.  I wish I had time to write about Lucy Baird.  And Mr. Jonathan Hill came—­his mortgage not having been foreclosed, after all.  When Cynthia was alone with Ephraim she often read to him,—­generally from books of a martial flavor,—­and listened with an admirable hypocrisy to certain narratives which he was in the habit of telling.

They never spoke of Jethro.  Ephraim was not a casuist, and his sense of right and wrong came largely through his affections.  It is safe to say that he never made an analysis of the sorrow which he knew was afflicting the girl, but he had had a general and most sympathetic understanding of it ever since the time when Jethro had gone back to the capital; and Ephraim never brought home his Guardian or his Clarion now, but read them at the office, that their contents might not disturb her.

No wonder that Cynthia was unhappy.  The letters came, almost every day, with the postmark of the town in New Jersey where Mr. Broke’s locomotive works were; and she answered them now (but oh, how scrupulously!), though not every day.  If the waters of love rose up through the grains of sand, it was, at least, not Cynthia’s fault.  Hers were the letters of a friend.  She was reading such and such a book—­had he read it?  And he must not work too hard.  How could her letters be otherwise when Jethro Bass, her benefactor, was at the capital working to defeat and perhaps to ruin Bob’s father? when Bob’s father had insulted and persecuted her?  She ought not to have written at all; but the lapses of such a heroine are very rare, and very dear.