of the supper table, and going to her
bedchamber, which was, country fashion, back of the sitting room, arrayed
herself in Horace's gifts,--the silk gown and fichu, with the onyx bar
and butterflies to fasten it,--and then returned to the porch to watch
the twilight gently veil sunset.

Upstairs, Horace unpacked his trunks in a rebellious mood. In the morning
he had felt in the proper sense self-sufficient and contented,--the
position, which a few months before he thought perhaps ten years ahead of
him, had suddenly dropped at his feet, and he felt a natural elation,
though it stopped quite short of self-conceit. He could afford to relax
the grip with which he had been holding himself in check, and face the
knowledge that he loved Sylvia; while the fact that fate had brought her
to summer in his vicinity seemed but another proof that fortune was
smiling upon him.

Now everything, though outwardly the same, was changed by the new point
of view, which he realized that he had already tried to conceal from his
mother, by his scanty account of the festival. He had been suddenly
confronted by conditions that he never expected to meet outside of the
pages of fiction, and felt himself utterly unable to combat them. Under
the present circumstances even neighbourly friendship with Sylvia would
be difficult. It was not that Mrs. Latham had overawed him in the least,
but she had raised in him so fierce and blinding a resentment by her only
half unconscious reference to his mother, that he resolved that under no
circumstances should she run the risk of being equally rebuffed. He would
protect her from a possible intercourse, where she could not be expected,
at her age, to hold her own, at no matter what cost to himself.

"Egg woman!" Was it not his mother's pride and endeavour, her thrift and
courage to carry on the great farm alone, and the price of such things as
those very eggs, that had carried through his dying father's wish, and
sent him to college, thus giving him his chance in the world? No regret
at the fact, no false pride, dawned on him even for a second. All his
rage was that such a woman as Sylvia's mother should have the power to
stir him so, and then his love for Sylvia herself, intensified by pity
for the unknown trouble that he sensed rather than read in her face, cut
into him like a wound. He felt as if he must pick her up in his strong
arms and bear her away from all those clamouring people; and then the
realiza