ch elaborate affairs as
are called spreads now, but I warrant you they were fully as much
enjoyed. I fancy we were rather sentimental. We used to hold imaginary
conversations in the person of some favorite characters in fiction; but
we were very young and boyish."

Perry glanced at me sheepishly, but George went on without noticing:

"Phil's father lived here, and was proprietor of the only wholesale
grocery-store the town then boasted of. He had been captain of a
volunteer company in the war, and, I fancy, had a romance too. At any
rate, his wife had been dead since Phil was a little fellow in
knickerbockers; and not very long after her death a certain Mrs. Preston
had sent a little girl, about a year older than Phil, with a dying
charge to the captain to care for the friendless orphan for the sake of
their early love. No one but Grace could ever get anything out of the
old gentleman about her mother, and she never learned much. Mrs. Preston
had been unhappy at least, and perhaps miserable, in her marriage. We
always thought she had forsaken Mr. Kendall in their youth and made a
hasty marriage; but never a word was uttered by him about Grace's
father.

"I used to imagine Mr. Kendall cared more for his adopted daughter than
for his son, from what I saw of them, and I was at the house a good deal
with Phil. I am sure they were very affectionate; and it was only
natural that the melancholy old man--that is the way he always struck
me--should have loved the daughter of the woman who had deserted him and
then turned toward him in her hour of supreme need. It showed that her
trust and belief in him and his goodness had never really left her. And,
besides, Grace was always so airy and light-hearted,--nothing could put
her out of humor,--so kind and gentle, and as lovely as a flower. She is
a splendid-looking woman yet, but one can have no idea of what she was
in those days, from the sad-eyed Mrs. Herbert who smiles so rarely on
any one but her little girl. Nannie is going to make much such a young
lady as her mother was, but I don't believe she will ever be quite so
beautiful.

"Well, I was not long in discovering that Phil was in love with his
father's adopted daughter. I was never quite sure whether he knew it
himself at the time or not, but I could see easily enough that she
didn't dream of such a thing, nor the old captain either. They were so
much like brother and sister it used to make me feel wofully sorry for
Phi