him a cold little hand, and he took it with
the same bewildered acquiescence. She looked at him, it seemed to her, a
long time, perhaps a full minute, and found him wholly alien to her
dreams of the wronged creature who was to be her brother. He was of a
good height, broad in the shoulders and standing well. His face held
nothing of the look she had always wrought into it from the picture of
his college year. It was rather square. The outline at least couldn't be
changed. The chin, she thought, was lovable. The eyes were large and
blue; stern, it seemed, but really from the habit of the forehead that
had been scarred with deepest lines. The high cheekbones gave him an odd
look as if she saw him in bronze. They stared at each other and Jeffrey
thought he ought to assure her he wasn't a tramp, when Lydia found her
voice.

"I'll tell Farvie," said she. She turned away from him, and immediately
whirled back again. "I've got to do it carefully. You stay here."

But in the library where the colonel sat over Mary Nellen's last classic
riddle, she couldn't break it at all.

"He's come," she said.

The colonel got up and Virgil slid to the floor.

"Where is he?" he called, in a sharp voice. It was a voice touched with
age and apprehension. The girls hadn't known how old a man he was until
they heard him calling for his son. Jeffrey heard it and came in with a
few long steps, and his father met him at the door. To the two girls
Jeff seemed astonished at the emotion he was awakening. How could he be,
they wondered, when this instant of his release had been so terrible and
so beautiful for a long time? The tears came rushing to their eyes, as
they saw Farvie. He had laid aside all his gentle restraint, and put his
shaking hands on Jeffrey's shoulders. And then he called him by the name
he had been saying over in his heart for these last lean years:

"My son! my son!"

If they had kissed, Lydia would not have been surprised. But the two
men looked at each other, the colonel took down his hands, and Jeffrey
drew forward a chair for him.

"Sit down a minute," he said, quite gently, and then the girls knew that
he really had been moved, though he hadn't shown it, and, ready to seize
upon anything to love in him, they decided they loved his voice. When
they had got away out of the room and stood close together in the
dining-room, as if he were a calamity to be fled from, that was the only
thing they could think of to break thei