while she ran to get her hat and boots, and to
call Ruth; and the first thing Barbara saw of them was from the
kitchen window, "slanting off" down over the croquet-ground toward the
big trees.

Somebody overtook and joined them there,--somebody in a dark gray suit
and bright buttons.

"Why, that," cried Barbara, all to herself and her uplifted skimmer,
looking after them,--"that must be the brother from West Point the
Inglesides expected,--that young Dakie Thayne!"

It was Dakie Thayne; who, after they had all been introduced and were
walking on comfortably together, asked Ruth Holabird if it had not
been she who had been expected and wanted so badly last night at Mrs.
Marchbanks's?

[Illustration]

Ruth dropped a little back as she walked with him, at the moment,
behind the others, along the path between the chestnut-trees.

"I don't think they quite expected me. I told Adelaide I did not think
I could come. I am the youngest, you see," she said with a smile, "and
I don't go out very much, except with my--cousins."

"Your cousins? I fancied you were all sisters."

"It is all the same," said Ruth. "And that is why I always catch my
breath a little before I say 'cousins.'"

"Couldn't they come? What a pity!" pursued this young man, who seemed
bent upon driving his questions home.

"O, it wasn't an invitation, you know. It wasn't company."

"Wasn't it?"

The inflection was almost imperceptible, and quite unintentional;
Dakie Thayne was very polite; but his eyebrows went up a little--just
a line or two--as he said it, the light beginning to come in upon him.

Dakie had been about in the world somewhat; his two years at West
Point were not all his experience; and he knew what queer little
wheels were turned sometimes.

He had just come to Z---- (I must have a letter for my nameless town,
and I have gone through the whole alphabet for it, and picked up a
crooked stick at last), and the new group of people he had got among
interested him. He liked problems and experiments. They were what he
excelled in at the Military School. This was his first furlough; and
it was since his entrance at the Academy that his brother, Dr.
Ingleside, had come to Z----, to take the vacant practice of an old
physician, disabled from continuing it.

Dakie and Leslie Goldthwaite and Mrs. Ingleside were old friends;
almost as old as Mrs. Ingleside and the doctor.

Ruth Holabird had a very young girl's romance of admiration for on