g impatiently at any delay that threatened to throw the train
behind schedule time.

"He'll be back in six weeks," declared Kirby, when Mrs. Jerviss and he
next met. "I know him well; he can't live without his club and his
counting room. It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks."

"And I'm sure he'll not stay away longer than three months," said the
lady confidently, "for I have invited him to my house party."

"A privilege," said Kirby gallantly, "for which many a man would come
from the other end of the world."

But they were both mistaken. For even as they spoke, he whose future
each was planning, was entering upon a new life of his own, from which
he was to look back upon his business career as a mere period of
preparation for the real end and purpose of his earthly existence.

_Two_

The hack which the colonel had taken at the station after a two-days'
journey, broken by several long waits for connecting trains, jogged in
somewhat leisurely fashion down the main street toward the hotel. The
colonel, with his little boy, had left the main line of railroad
leading north and south and had taken at a certain way station the one
daily train for Clarendon, with which the express made connection.
They had completed the forty-mile journey in two or three hours,
arriving at Clarendon at noon.

It was an auspicious moment for visiting the town. It is true that the
grass grew in the street here and there, but the sidewalks were
separated from the roadway by rows of oaks and elms and china-trees in
early leaf. The travellers had left New York in the midst of a
snowstorm, but here the scent of lilac and of jonquil, the song of
birds, the breath of spring, were all about them. The occasional
stretches of brick sidewalk under their green canopy looked cool and
inviting; for while the chill of winter had fled and the sultry heat
of summer was not yet at hand, the railroad coach had been close and
dusty, and the noonday sun gave some slight foretaste of his coming
reign.

The colonel looked about him eagerly. It was all so like, and yet so
different--shrunken somewhat, and faded, but yet, like a woman one
loves, carried into old age something of the charm of youth. The old
town, whose ripeness was almost decay, whose quietness was scarcely
distinguishable from lethargy, had been the home of his youth, and he
saw it, strange to say, less with the eyes of the lad of sixteen who
had gone to the war, than with those