lf and Jerome,
which was troubling her so, and let her decide as to whether she had
been lacking in hospitality or not, and give her advice. But she
could not quite bring herself to do that.

The moon arose behind the house, she could not see it, but she knew
it was there by the swarming of pale lights under the pine-trees, and
the bristling of their tops as with needles of silver. She heard a
whippoorwill in the distance calling as from some undiscovered
country; there was an undertone of frogs from marshy meadows swelling
and dying in even cadences of sound.

Lucina's mother came to the door and put her hand on the girl's head.
"You must come in," she said; "your hair feels quite damp. You will
take cold. Your dress is thin, too."

Lucina rose obediently and followed her mother into the sitting-room,
where sat Squire Eben and Colonel Lamson in swirling clouds of
tobacco smoke.

Lucina's cheeks had a wonderful clear freshness of red and white from
the damp night air. There were no traces of tears on her sweet blue
eyes. She came into the bright room with a smiling shrinking from the
light, which gave her the expression of an angel. Both men gazed at
her with a sort of passion of tenderest admiration, and also a
certain sadness of yearning--the Squire because of that instinct of
insecurity and possibility of loss to which possession itself gives
rise, the Colonel because of the awakening of old vain longings in
his own heart.

The Squire reached out a hand towards Lucina, caught her first by her
flowing skirt, then by her fair arm, and drew her close to his side
and pulled down her soft face to his. "Well, Pretty, how goes the
world?" he said, with a laugh, which had almost the catch of a sob,
so anxiously tender he was of her, and so timid before his own
delight in her.

When she had kissed him and bade him good-night, Lucina went up to
her own chamber and her mother with her.

"Abigail follows the child, since she came home, like a hen with one
chicken," the Squire said, smiling almost foolishly in his utter
pride of this beautiful daughter.

The Colonel nodded, frowning gravely over his pipe at the opposite
window. "She makes me think a little of my wife at her age," he said.

The Squire started. It was the first time he had ever heard the
Colonel mention his wife. He sighed, looked at him, and hesitated
with a delicacy of reticence. "It must have been a hard blow," he
ventured, finally.

The Colonel n