“What a beautiful ring you are wearing, Honora,” Uncle Tom remarked slyly one April morning at breakfast; “let me see it.”

Honora blushed, and hid her hand under the table-cloth.

And the ring-suffice it to say that her little finger was exactly insertable in a ten-cent piece from which everything had been removed but the milling:  removed with infinite loving patience by Mr. Rossiter, and at the expense of much history and philosophy and other less important things, in his college bedroom at New Haven.  Honora wore it for a whole week; a triumph indeed for Mr. Rossiter; when it was placed in a box in Honora’s bedroom, which contained other gifts—­not all from him—­and many letters, in the writing of which learning had likewise suffered.  The immediate cause of the putting away of this ring was said to be the renowned Clinton Howe, who was on the Harvard football eleven, and who visited Mr. George Hanbury that Easter.  Fortunate indeed the tailor who was called upon to practise his art on an Adonis like Mr. Howe, and it was remarked that he scarcely left Honora’s side at the garden party and dance which Mrs. Dwyer gave in honour of the returning heroes, on the Monday of Easter week.

This festival, on which we should like to linger, but cannot, took place at the new Dwyer residence.  For six months the Victorian mansion opposite Uncle Tom’s house had been sightless, with blue blinds drawn down inside the plate glass windows.  And the yellow stone itself was not so yellow as it once had been, but had now the appearance of soiled manilla wrapping paper, with black streaks here and there where the soot had run.  The new Dwyer house was of grey stone, Georgian and palatial, with a picture-gallery twice the size of the old one; a magnificent and fitting pioneer in a new city of palaces.

Westward the star of Empire—­away from the smoke.  The Dwyer mansion, with its lawns and gardens and heavily balustraded terrace, faced the park that stretched away like a private estate to the south and west.  That same park with its huge trees and black forests that was Ultima Thule in Honora’s childhood; in the open places there had been real farms and hayricks which she used to slide down with Peter while Uncle Tom looked for wild flowers in the fields.  It had been separated from the city in those days by an endless country road, like a Via Claudia stretching towards mysterious Germanian forests, and it was deemed a feat for Peter to ride thither on his big-wheeled bicycle.  Forest Park was the country, and all that the country represented in Honora’s childhood.  For Uncle Tom on a summer’s day to hire a surrey at Braintree’s Livery Stable and drive thither was like—­to what shall that bliss be compared in these days when we go to Europe with indifference?

And now Lindell Road—­the Via Claudia of long, ago—­had become Lindell Boulevard, with granitoid sidewalks.  And the dreary fields through which it had formerly run were bristling with new houses in no sense Victorian, and which were the first stirrings of a national sense of the artistic.  The old horse-cars with the clanging chains had disappeared, and you could take an electric to within a block of the imposing grille that surrounded the Dwyer grounds.  Westward the star!