made
alliances with Americans, and shared their land with them, had rarely
succeeded in alienating their retainers with their lands. Certain
experiences in the proving of his grant before the Land Commission had
taught Peyton that they were not to be depended upon. And lately
there had been unpleasant rumors of the discovery of some unlooked-for
claimants to a division of the grant itself, which might affect his own
title.

He looked up quickly as voices and light steps on the veranda at last
heralded the approach of his tardy household from the corridor. But, in
spite of his preoccupation, he was startled and even awkwardly impressed
with a change in Susy's appearance. She was wearing, for the first time,
a long skirt, and this sudden maturing of her figure struck him, as a
man, much more forcibly than it would probably have impressed a woman,
more familiar with details. He had not noticed certain indications of
womanhood, as significant, perhaps, in her carriage as her outlines,
which had been lately perfectly apparent to her mother and Mary, but
which were to him now, for the first time, indicated by a few inches of
skirt. She not only looked taller to his masculine eyes, but these few
inches had added to the mystery as well as the drapery of the goddess;
they were not so much the revelation of maturity as the suggestion that
it was HIDDEN. So impressed was he, that a half-serious lecture on her
yesterday's childishness, the outcome of his irritated reflections that
morning, died upon his lips. He felt he was no longer dealing with a
child.

He welcomed them with that smile of bantering approbation, supposed to
keep down inordinate vanity, which for some occult reason one always
reserves for the members of one's own family. He was quite conscious
that Susy was looking very pretty in this new and mature frock, and that
as she stood beside his wife, far from ageing Mrs. Peyton's good looks
and figure, she appeared like an equal companion, and that they mutually
"became" one another. This, and the fact that they were all, including
Mary Rogers, in their freshest, gayest morning dresses, awakened a
half-humorous, half-real apprehension in his mind, that he was now
hopelessly surrounded by a matured sex, and in a weak minority.

"I think I ought to have been prepared," he began grimly, "for this
addition to--to--the skirts of my family."

"Why, John," returned Mrs. Peyton quickly; "do you mean to say
you haven't noti