her stick in the old place here, and us go into
the new house?" At times the Colonel's grammar failed him.

The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before, with joking
recurrences to the house on the water side of Beacon. The Colonel
seemed less in earnest than any of them about it; but that was his way,
his girls said; you never could tell when he really meant a thing.

III.

TOWARD the end of the winter there came a newspaper, addressed to Miss
Irene Lapham; it proved to be a Texas newspaper, with a complimentary
account of the ranch of the Hon. Loring G. Stanton, which the
representative of the journal had visited.

"It must be his friend," said Mrs. Lapham, to whom her daughter brought
the paper; "the one he's staying with."

The girl did not say anything, but she carried the paper to her room,
where she scanned every line of it for another name. She did not find
it, but she cut the notice out and stuck it into the side of her
mirror, where she could read it every morning when she brushed her
hair, and the last thing at night when she looked at herself in the
glass just before turning off the gas. Her sister often read it aloud,
standing behind her and rendering it with elocutionary effects.

"The first time I ever heard of a love-letter in the form of a puff to
a cattle-ranch. But perhaps that's the style on the Hill."

Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the arrival of the paper, treating the
fact with an importance that he refused to see in it.

"How do you know the fellow sent it, anyway?" he demanded.

"Oh, I know he did."

"I don't see why he couldn't write to 'Rene, if he really meant
anything."

"Well, I guess that wouldn't be their way," said Mrs. Lapham; she did
not at all know what their way would be.

When the spring opened Colonel Lapham showed that he had been in
earnest about building on the New Land. His idea of a house was a
brown-stone front, four stories high, and a French roof with an
air-chamber above. Inside, there was to be a reception-room on the
street and a dining-room back. The parlours were to be on the second
floor, and finished in black walnut or party-coloured paint. The
chambers were to be on the three floors above, front and rear, with
side-rooms over the front door. Black walnut was to be used everywhere
except in the attic, which was to be painted and grained to look like
black walnut. The whole was to be very high-studded, and there were to
be han