something, you two girls?" she asked, with her inviting
smile. "I'm sure Jeff wrote me so."

"We dance," said Lydia, in a bubbling bright voice, as if she had run
forward to be sure to get the chance of answering. "Let us come and
dance for you. We can dance all sorts of things."

And Lydia was so purely childlike and dear, after this talk of
punishments and duties, that involuntarily they all laughed and she
looked abashed.

"Perhaps you know folk-dances," said Miss Amabel.

"Oh, yes," said Lydia, getting back her spirit. "There isn't one we
don't know."

And they laughed again and Miss Amabel tied on her bonnet and went away
attended by Choate, with Weedon Moore a pace behind, holding his hat,
until he got out of the house, as it might be at a grotesque funeral.

Miss Amabel had called back to Lydia:

"You must come and train my classes in their national dancing."

Lydia, behind the colonel and Jeff as they stood at the front door,
seized Anne's hand and did a few ecstatic little steps.

The colonel was bright-eyed and satisfied with his evening. "Jeff," said
he, before they turned to separate, "I always thought you were meant for
a writer."

Jeff looked at him in a dull denial, as if he wondered how any man, life
being what it is, could seek to bound the lot of another man. His face,
flushed darkly, was seamed with feeling.

"Father," said he, in a voice of mysterious reproach, "I don't know what
I was meant to be."

X

It was Lydia who found out what Jeff meant himself to be, for the next
day, in course of helping Mary Nellen, she went to his door with towels.
Mr. Jeffrey had gone out, Mary Nellen said. She had seen him spading in
the orchard, and if Miss Lydia wanted to carry up the towels! there was
the dusting, too. Lydia, at the open door, stopped, for Jeff was sitting
at his writing table, paper before him. He flicked a look at her,
absently, as at an intruder as insignificant as undesired, and because
the sacredness of his task was plain to her she took it humbly. But
Jeff, then actually seeing her, rose and put down his pen.

"I'll take those," he said.

It troubled him vaguely to find her and Anne doing tasks. He had a
worried sense that he and the colonel were living on their kind offices,
and he felt like assuring Lydia she shouldn't carry towels about for
either of them long. Then, as she did not yield them but looked,
housekeeper-wise, at the rack still loaded with its tumbled