d her color, and given her a glowing expression
which her face had not the night before, and a tenderness and softness,
an unworldliness, brought from the quiet hour in the church.

"My lady comes at last,
Timid and stepping fast,
And hastening hither,
Her modest eyes downcast."

She greeted the stranger with a Puritan undemonstrativeness, and as if
not exactly aware of his presence.

"I should like to have gone to vespers if I had known," said Mr. Lyon,
after an embarrassing pause.

"Yes?" asked the girl, still abstractedly. "The world seems in a vesper
mood," she added, looking out the west windows at the red sky and the
evening star.

In truth Nature herself at the moment suggested that talk was an
impertinence. The callers rose to go, with an exchange of neighborhood
friendliness and invitations.

"I had no idea," said Mr. Lyon, as they walked homeward, "what the New
World was like."

III

Mr. Lyon's invitation was for a week. Before the end of the week I
was called to New York to consult Mr. Henderson in regard to a railway
investment in the West, which was turning out more permanent than
profitable. Rodney Henderson--the name later became very familiar to the
public in connection with a certain Congressional investigation--was a
graduate of my own college, a New Hampshire boy, a lawyer by profession,
who practiced, as so many American lawyers do, in Wall Street, in
political combinations, in Washington, in railways. He was already known
as a rising man.

When I returned Mr. Lyon was still at our house. I understood that my
wife had persuaded him to extend his visit--a proposal he was little
reluctant to fall in with, so interested had he become in studying
social life in America. I could well comprehend this, for we are all
making a "study" of something in this age, simple enjoyment being
considered an unworthy motive. I was glad to see that the young
Englishman was improving himself, broadening his knowledge of life, and
not wasting the golden hours of youth. Experience is what we all need,
and though love or love-making cannot be called a novelty, there is
something quite fresh about the study of it in the modern spirit.

Mr. Lyon had made himself very agreeable to the little circle, not less
by his inquiring spirit than by his unaffected manners, by a kind
of simplicity which women recognize as unconscious, the result of an
inherited habit of not thin