e stronger rays he
stood still and looked at her as if he wanted to make up for months of
deprivation. She turned a rosy red under his scrutiny, her cheeks looking
like moist but vivid flowers, drops of rain sparkling in her hair and
clinging even to her lashes.

"Come in by the fire and dry your hair," he commanded.

She shook her head and drew away her hand. "No, I'll run up and dry
everything at once."

"You won't be all the evening about it?" he questioned, with suspicion,
for her attitude suggested flight.

"How can I tell?" The old mischief looked out of her eyes.

He took a step toward her. "Come and get the first wet off by the
fire," he urged.

But, laughing, she fled up the stairs.

"I didn't know he was such a distinguished-looking person," she was
owning to herself as she ran along the upper hall. "Why, he's grown so
much heavier and handsomer I'm actually afraid of him--it doesn't seem
like the same Jarvis Burnside I've known so long. He's--he's--what
Dorothy Chase would call stunning! I never supposed that farming would
have that effect on anybody."

Then she rushed into her own room to find it in spotless order, with
evidences of Joanna's recent presence in a brisk little fire burning in
the small bedroom fireplace, the freshest of appointments everywhere, and
a trimly bright lamp upon the old cherry dressing-table which had come
from New Hampshire among Uncle Timothy's furniture.

"My trunk isn't here--what in the world shall I put on?" was her first
anxiety. She opened the door of her closet, to find all her last
summer's frocks newly "done up" and hanging there in inviting
daintiness. She caught at the lilac muslin, now faded by many washings
into a mere tint, but looking so like home and good times that it seemed
the fitting thing to don, in the absence of her heavier dresses, even
upon an April night.

A half-hour later, her hair crisply dried by the fire and curling
blithely from its recent bath, herself sweet with the soap-and-water and
clean-clothes freshness which is the only fragrance worth cultivating,
Sally stole on tiptoe to the top of the stairs and peeped down. She
beheld Jarvis pacing up and down the hall, and as she looked saw him take
his watch out and scan its face as if he had an appointment to keep. She
stood still, her pulses beating rather quickly. This was not exactly the
sort of home-coming she had planned, this reception by one person. But it
was nearly ten o'clock a