uses to come without being brought, if he wished to
come," said the mother. "But she isn't in his mind enough to make him.
He goes away and doesn't think anything more about her. She's a child.
She's a good child, and I shall always say it; but she's nothing but a
child. No, she's got to forget him."

"Perhaps that won't be so easy."

"No, I presume not. And now your father has got the notion in his
head, and he will move heaven and earth to bring it to pass. I can see
that he's always thinking about it."

"The Colonel has a will of his own," observed the girl, rocking to and
fro where she sat looking at her mother.

"I wish we had never met them!" cried Mrs. Lapham. "I wish we had
never thought of building! I wish he had kept away from your father's
business!"

"Well, it's too late now, mother," said the girl. "Perhaps it isn't so
bad as you think."

"Well, we must stand it, anyway," said Mrs. Lapham, with the grim
antique Yankee submission.

"Oh yes, we've got to stand it," said Penelope, with the quaint modern
American fatalism.

X.

IT was late June, almost July, when Corey took up his life in Boston
again, where the summer slips away so easily. If you go out of town
early, it seems a very long summer when you come back in October; but
if you stay, it passes swiftly, and, seen foreshortened in its flight,
seems scarcely a month's length. It has its days of heat, when it is
very hot, but for the most part it is cool, with baths of the east wind
that seem to saturate the soul with delicious freshness. Then there
are stretches of grey westerly weather, when the air is full of the
sentiment of early autumn, and the frying, of the grasshopper in the
blossomed weed of the vacant lots on the Back Bay is intershot with the
carol of crickets; and the yellowing leaf on the long slope of Mt.
Vernon Street smites the sauntering observer with tender melancholy.
The caterpillar, gorged with the spoil of the lindens on Chestnut, and
weaving his own shroud about him in his lodgment on the brick-work,
records the passing of summer by mid-July; and if after that comes
August, its breath is thick and short, and September is upon the
sojourner before he has fairly had time to philosophise the character
of the town out of season.

But it must have appeared that its most characteristic feature was the
absence of everybody he knew. This was one of the things that
commended Boston to Bromfield Corey during th