t you to come and
bring your ward. Will you please ring, so that Martha will bring the
lights? I should like to send Nan a nice letter to read which came
yesterday from my little grand-daughter in Rome. I shall be so glad
when they are all at home again. She is about Nan's age, you know; I
must see to it that they make friends with each other. Don't put me on
a dusty top shelf again and forget me for five or six weeks," laughed
the hostess, as her guest protested and lingered a minute still before
he opened the door.

"You won't say anything of my confidences?" at which Mrs. Graham
shakes her head with satisfactory gravity, though if Doctor Leslie had
known she was inwardly much amused, and assured herself directly that
she hoped to hear no more of such plans; how could he tell that the
girl herself would agree to them, and whether Oldfields itself would
favor Nan as his own successor and its medical adviser? But John
Leslie was a wise, far-seeing man, with a great power of holding to
his projects. He really must be kept to his promise of a weekly visit;
she was of some use in the world after all, so long as these
unprotected neighbors were in it, and at any rate she had gained her
point about the poor child's clothes.

As for the doctor, he found the outer world much obscured by the
storm, and hoped that nobody would need his services that night, as he
went stumbling home though the damp and clogging snow underfoot. He
felt a strange pleasure in the sight of a small, round head at the
front study window between the glass and the curtain, and Nan came to
open the door for him, while Marilla, whose unwonted Sunday afternoon
leisure seemed to have been devoted to fragrant experiments in
cookery, called in pleased tones from the dining-room that she had
begun to be afraid he was going to stay out to supper. It was somehow
much more homelike than it used to be, the doctor told himself, as he
pushed his feet into the slippers which had been waiting before the
fire until they were in danger of being scorched. And before Marilla
had announced with considerable ceremony that tea was upon the table,
he had assured himself that it had been a very pleasant hour or two at
Mrs. Graham's, and it was the best thing in the world for both of them
to see something of each other. For the little girl's sake he must try
to keep out of ruts, and must get hold of somebody outside his own
little world.

But while he called himself an old f