accustomed
kiss he pushed the thick curls from off her face and said, "I never
saw you look so happy, Maude. Do you like that Mr. De Vere?"

"Which one?" asked Maude. "There are two, you know."

"Yes, I know," returned Louis, "but I mean the one with the voice.
Forgive me, Maude, but I sat ever so long at the head of the stairs,
listening as he talked. He is a good man, I am sure. Will you tell
me how he looks?"

Maude could not well describe him. She only knew that he was taller
than J.C., and, as she thought, much finer looking, with deep blue
eyes, dark brown hair, and a mouth just fitted to his voice. Farther
than this she could not tell. "But you will see him in the morning,"
she said. "I have told him how gifted, how good, you are, and
to-morrow, he says, he shall visit you in your den."

"Don't let the other one come," said Louis hastily, "for if he can't
endure red hands he'd laugh at my withered feet and the bunch upon
my back; but the other one won't, I know."

Maude knew so too, and somewhat impatiently she waited for the
morrow, when she could introduce her brother to her friend. The
morrow came, but, as was frequently the case, Louis was suffering
from a severe pain in his back, which kept him confined to his room,
so that Mr. De Vere neither saw him at all nor Maude as much as he
wished to do. He had been greatly interested in her, and when at
dinner he heard that she would not be down he was conscious of a
feeling of disappointment. She was not present at supper either, but
after it was over she joined him in the parlor, and, together with
J.C. and Nellie, accompanied him to the graveyard, where, seating
herself upon her mother's grave, she told him of that mother, and
the desolation which crept into her heart when first she knew she
was an orphan. From talking of her mother it was an easy matter to
speak of her Vernon home, which she had never seen since she left it
twelve years before, and then Mr. De Vere asked if she had met two
boys in the cars on her way to Albany. At first Maude could not
recall them, and when at last she did so her recollections were so
vague that Mr. De Vere felt another pang of disappointment, though
wherefore he could not tell, unless indeed, he thought there would
be something pleasant in being remembered twelve long years by a
girl like Maude Remington. He reminded her of her remark made to his
cousin, and in speaking of him casually alluded to his evident
liking for N