“Come up, my dear, and let me look at you,” were Mrs. Cavendish’s first words of salutation to Lucy.  “I hear you have quite turned the heads of all the gallants in Warehold.  John says you are very beautiful, and you know the doctor is a good judge, is he not, Miss Jane?” she added, holding out her hands to them both.  “And he’s quite right; you are just like your dear mother, who was known as the Rose of Barnegat long before you were born.  Shall we sit here, or will you come into my little salon for a cup of tea?” It was always a salon to Mrs. Cavendish, never a “sitting-room.”

“Oh, please let me sit here,” Lucy answered, checking a rising smile at the word, “the view is so lovely,” and without further comment or any reference to the compliments showered upon her, she took her seat upon the top step and began to play with Rex, who had already offered to make friends with her, his invariable habit with well-dressed people.

Jane meanwhile improved the occasion to ask the doctor’s mother about the hospital they were building near Barnegat, and whether she and one or two of the other ladies at Warehold would not be useful as visitors, and, perhaps, in case of emergency, as nurses.

While the talk was in progress Lucy sat smoothing Rex’s silky ears, listening to every word her hostess spoke, watching her gestures and the expressions that crossed her face, and settling in her mind for all time, after the manner of young girls, what sort of woman the doctor’s mother might be; any opinions she might have had two years before being now outlawed by this advanced young woman in her present mature judgment.

In that comprehensive glance, with the profound wisdom of her seventeen summers to help her, she had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Cavendish was a high-strung, nervous, fussy little woman of fifty, with an outward show of good-will and an inward intention to rip everybody up the back who opposed her; proud of her home, of her blood, and of her son, and determined, if she could manage it, to break off his attachment for Jane, no matter at what cost.  This last Lucy caught from a peculiar look in the little old woman’s eyes and a slightly scornful curve of the lower lip as she listened to Jane’s talk about the hospital, all of which was lost on “plain Jane Cobden,” as the doctor’s mother invariably called her sister behind her back.

Then the young mind-reader turned her attention to the house and grounds and the buildings lying above and before her, especially to the way the matted vines hung to the porches and clambered over the roof and dormers.  Later on she listened to Mrs. Cavendish’s description of its age and ancestry:  How it had come down to her from her grandfather, whose large estate was near Trenton, where as a girl she had spent her life; how in those days it was but a small villa to which old Nicholas Erskine, her great-uncle, would bring his guests when the August days made Trenton unbearable; and how in later years under the big trees back of the house and over the lawn—­“you can see them from where you sit, my dear”—­tea had been served to twenty or more of “the first gentlemen and ladies of the land.”