ever to be long absent from one place or the other.

Margaret came to Brandon at the beginning of June, just at the season
when the region was at its loveliest, and just when its society was
making preparations to get away from it to the sea, or the mountains,
or to any place that was not home. I could never understand why a people
who have been grumbling about snow and frost for six months, and longing
for genial weather, should flee from it as soon as it comes. I had made
the discovery, quite by chance--and it was so novel that I might have
taken out a patent on it--that if one has a comfortable home in our
northern latitude, he cannot do better than to stay in it when the hum
of the mosquito is heard in the land, and the mercury is racing up and
down the scale between fifty and ninety. This opinion, however, did not
extend beyond our little neighborhood, and we may be said to have had
the summer to ourselves.

I fancied that the neighborhood had not changed, but the coming of
Margaret showed me that this was a delusion. No one can keep in the same
place in life simply by standing still, and the events of the past two
years had wrought a subtle change in our quiet. Nothing had been changed
to the eye, yet something had been taken away, or something had been
added, a door had been opened into the world. Margaret had come home,
yet I fancied it was not the home to her that she had been thinking
about. Had she changed?

She was more beautiful. She had the air--I should hesitate to call it
that of the fine lady--of assured position, something the manner of that
greater world in which the possession of wealth has supreme importance,
but it was scarcely a change of manner so much as of ideas about life
and of the things valuable in it gradually showing itself. Her delight
at being again with her old friends was perfectly genuine, and she
had never appeared more unselfish or more affectionate. If there was
a subtle difference, it might very well be in us, though I found it
impossible to conceive of her in her former role of teacher and simple
maiden, with her heart in the little concerns of our daily life. And why
should she be expected to go back to that stage? Must we not all live
our lives? Miss Forsythe's solicitude about Margaret was mingled with
a curious deference, as to one who had a larger experience of life
than her own. The girl of a year ago was now the married woman, and was
invested with something of the dign