burning leaves, and for the annual editorials, in the papers, on the
purple haze, the golden branches, the ruddy fruit, and the pleasure of
long tramps in the brown forest. George had not heard of her arrival,
and he met her, on the afternoon following that event, at the Sharons',
where he had gone in the secret hope that he might hear something about
her. Janie Sharon had just begun to tell him that she heard Lucy
was expected home soon, after having "a perfectly gorgeous
time"--information which George received with no responsive
enthusiasm--when Lucy came demurely in, a proper little autumn figure in
green and brown.

Her cheeks were flushed, and her dark eyes were bright indeed;
evidences, as George supposed, of the excitement incidental to the
perfectly gorgeous time just concluded; though Janie and Mary Sharon
both thought they were the effect of Lucy's having seen George's
runabout in front of the house as she came in. George took on colour,
himself, as, he rose and nodded indifferently; and the hot suffusion to
which he became subject extended its area to include his neck and ears.
Nothing could have made him much more indignant than his consciousness
of these symptoms of the icy indifference which it was his purpose not
only to show but to feel.

She kissed her cousins, gave George her hand, said "How d'you do," and
took a chair beside Janie with a composure which augmented George's
indignation.

"How d'you do," he said. "I trust that ah--I trust--I do trust--"

He stopped, for it seemed to him that the word "trust" sounded idiotic.
Then, to cover his awkwardness, he coughed, and even to his own rosy
ears his cough was ostentatiously a false one. Whereupon, seeking to be
plausible, he coughed again, and instantly hated himself: the sound he
made was an atrocity. Meanwhile, Lucy sat silent, and the two Sharon
girls leaned forward, staring at him with strained eyes, their lips
tightly compressed; and both were but too easily diagnosed as subject to
an agitation which threatened their self-control. He began again.

"I er--I hope you have had a--a pleasant time. I er--I hope you are
well. I hope you are extremely--I hope extremely--extremely--" And again
he stopped in the midst of his floundering, not knowing how to progress
beyond "extremely," and unable to understand why the infernal word kept
getting into his mouth.

"I beg your pardon?" Lucy said.

George was never more furious; he felt that he was "mak