we all went to take
luncheon together, any one would have thought that Uncle Chipperton was
really a born brother to father and old Mr. Colbert. How he did talk!
How everybody talked! Except Helen. She just sat and listened and looked
at Corny--a girl who had been shipwrecked, and had been on a little raft
in the midst of the stormy billows. My mother and the two other ladies
cried a good deal, but it was a sunshiny sort of crying, and wouldn't
have happened so often, I think, if Mrs. Chipperton had not been so
ready to lead off.

After luncheon we sat for two or three hours in one of the parlors, and
talked, and talked, and talked. It was a sort of family congress.
Everybody told everybody else what he or she was going to do, and took
information of the same kind in trade. I was to go to college in the
fall, but as that had been pretty much settled long ago, it couldn't be
considered as news. I looked well enough, my father said, to do all the
hard studying that was needed; and the professor was anxiously waiting
to put me through a course of training for the happy lot of Freshman.

"But he's not going to begin his studies as soon as he gets home," said
my mother. "We're going to have him to ourselves for a while." And I did
not doubt that. I hadn't been gone very long, to be sure, but then a
ship had been burned from under me, and that counted for about a year's
absence.

Corny's fate had been settled, too, in a general way, but the discussion
that went on about a good boarding-school for her showed that a
particular settlement might take some time. Uncle Chipperton wanted her
to go to some school near his place on the Hudson River, so that he
could drive over and see her every day or two, and Mrs. Colbert said she
thought that that wouldn't do, because no girl could study as she ought
to, if her father was coming to see her all the time, and Uncle
Chipperton wanted to know what possible injury she thought he would do
his daughter by going to see her; and Mrs. Colbert said, none at all, of
course she didn't mean that, and Mrs. Chipperton said that Corny and her
father ought really to go to the same school, and then we all laughed,
and my father put in quickly, and asked about Rectus. It was easy to see
that it would take all summer to get a school for Corny.

"Well," said Mr. Colbert, "I've got a place for Sammy. Right in my
office. He's to be a man of business, you know. He never took much to
schooling. I sent hi