station; the train is due in
fifteen minutes."

When he was gone Bessie began to feel a little nervous with regard to
the stranger coming among them. Hitherto she had thought only of the
extra expense and the trouble he would give old Dorothy, whose feet and
ankles were badly swollen and paining her so much.

"I may have to cook and serve the Christmas dinner myself," she said,
"and I don't mind the work; only I do not want this American from
Boston, where the women are so full of brains, to think me a mere
dishwasher and chimney-sweep. I wonder if he is half as nice as Neil
says he is, and if I shall like him. Of course I sha'n't, but I shall
treat him well for Neil's sake, and be so glad when he has gone."

Then she proceeded to lay the table for supper, as they usually dined in
the middle of the day. Dorothy's feet were more active then, and Archie
preferred an early dinner. Everything was in readiness at last; the
bread and the butter and the jam, with cold chicken and ham, and the
kettle singing on the hearth; the curtains drawn and the bright fire
making shadows on the wall and falling upon the young girl, who, as her
ear caught the sound of footsteps without, ran to the window, and
parting the heavy curtains, looked out into the darkness so that the
first glimpse Grey Jerrold had of her was of her fair, eager face framed
in waves of golden brown hair, and pressed against the window pane in
the vain effort to see the dreaded American.

CHAPTER X.

GREY.

Between the man of twenty-three and the boy of fourteen, who had knelt
upon the snow in the leafless woods and asked God to forgive him for his
grandfather's sin, and had pledged himself to undo as far as was
possible the wrong to others that sin had caused, there was the
difference of nine years of growth, and culture, and experience, and
knowledge of the world; but otherwise the boy and the man were the same,
for as the Grey of fourteen had been frank, and truthful, and generous,
and wholly unselfish, with a gentleness in his nature like that of a
tender, loving woman, so was the Grey of twenty-three whom we last saw
upon the steamer which was taking him away from home and the lonely
woman watching so tearfully upon the wharf, and feeling that with his
going her joyless life was made more desolate.

Since that time there had been a year's travel upon the Continent with
his parents, and then he had entered at Eton, where he renewed his
acquaintan