y-looking foxhound. The dog Toby, charging out of the door as Nancy
opened it, fell, as it were, upon the neck of the hound. His overtures
of friendship were met with a dignified aloofness which merged gradually
into a reluctant cordiality.

Nancy held out both hands to the old man. "I saw you coming. Oh, how good
it seems to be here again, Cousin David."

"Let me look at you." He set the basket down, and took her hands in his.
Then he shook his head. "New York has done things to you," he said. "It
has given you a few gray hairs. But now that you are back again I shall
try to forgive it."

"I shall never forgive it," she said, "for what it has done to me and
mine."

"But you are here, and you have brought your boy; that's a thing to be
thankful for, Nancy."

They were silent in the face of overwhelming memories. The only sound in
the shadowy hall was the ticking of the old clock--the old clock which
had tick-tocked in all the years of loneliness with no one to listen.

Richard greeted him with heartiness. "This looks pretty good to me,
Cousin David."

"It's God's country, Richard. Brin hates it. He loves his club and the
city streets. But for me there's nothing worth while but this sweep of
the hills and the river between."

He uncovered his basket. "Tom put up some things for you. I've engaged
Milly, a mulatto girl, but she can't get here until to-morrow. She is
about the best there is left. Most of them go to town. She'll probably
seem pretty crude after New York servants, Nancy."

"I don't care." Nancy almost sang the words. "I don't care what I have to
put up with, Cousin David. I shall sleep to-night under my own roof with
nothing between me and the stars. And there won't be anybody overhead or
underneath, and there won't be a pianola to the right of me, and a
phonograph to the left, and there won't be the rumble of the subway or
the crash of the elevated, and in the morning I shall open my eyes and
see the sun rise over the river, and I shall look out upon the world that
I love and have loved all of these years----"

And now she was crying, and Richard had her in his arms. Over her head he
looked at the older man. "I didn't dream that she felt like this."

"I knew--as soon as I saw her. You must never take her back, Richard."

"Of course not," hotly.

Yet with the perverseness of youth he was aware, as he said it, of a
sudden sense of revolt against the prospect of a future spent in this
quiet plac