"

CHAPTER II

SPRING BLOSSOMS

For days the neighbors in and about the village of Warehold had been
looking forward to Lucy's home-coming as one of the important epochs in
the history of the Manor House, quite as they would have done had Lucy
been a boy and the expected function one given in honor of the youthful
heir's majority. Most of them had known the father and mother of these
girls, and all of them loved Jane, the gentle mistress of the home--a
type of woman eminently qualified to maintain its prestige.

It had been a great house in its day. Built in early Revolutionary
times by Archibald Cobden, who had thrown up his office under the Crown
and openly espoused the cause of the colonists, it had often been the
scene of many of the festivities and social events following the
conclusion of peace and for many years thereafter: the rooms were still
pointed out in which Washington and Lafayette had slept, as well as the
small alcove where the dashing Bart de Klyn passed the night whenever
he drove over in his coach with outriders from Bow Hill to Barnegat and
the sea.

With the death of Colonel Creighton Cobden, who held a commission in
the War of 1812, all this magnificence of living had changed, and when
Morton Cobden, the father of Jane and Lucy, inherited the estate, but
little was left except the Manor House, greatly out of repair, and some
invested property which brought in but a modest income. On his
death-bed Morton Cobden's last words were a prayer to Jane, then
eighteen, that she would watch over and protect her younger sister, a
fair-haired child of eight, taking his own and her dead mother's place,
a trust which had so dominated Jane's life that it had become the
greater part of her religion.

Since then she had been the one strong hand in the home, looking after
its affairs, managing their income, and watching over every step of her
sister's girlhood and womanhood. Two years before she had placed Lucy
in one of the fashionable boarding-schools of Philadelphia, there to
study "music and French," and to perfect herself in that "grace of
manner and charm of conversation," which the two maiden ladies who
presided over its fortunes claimed in their modest advertisements they
were so competent to teach. Part of the curriculum was an enforced
absence from home of two years, during which time none of her own
people were to visit her except in case of emergency.

To-night, the once famous house sh