y, and Kenton's heart ached with tender pain as he
passed up the neatly kept walk from the gate, between the blooming ranks
of syringas and snowballs, to his door, and witnessed the faithful
care that Richard's hired man had bestowed upon every detail. The grass
between the banks of roses and rhododendrons had been as scrupulously
lawn-mowered and as sedulously garden-hosed as if Kenton himself had
been there to look after its welfare, or had tended the shrubbery as
he used to do in earlier days with his own hand. The oaks which he had
planted shook out their glossy green in the morning gale, and in the
tulip-trees, which had snowed their petals on the ground in wide circles
defined by the reach of their branches, he heard the squirrels barking;
a red-bird from the woody depths behind the house mocked the cat-birds
in the quince-trees. The June rose was red along the trellis of the
veranda, where Lottie ought to be sitting to receive the morning calls
of the young men who were sometimes quite as early as Kenton's present
visit in their devotions, and the sound of Ellen's piano, played
fitfully and absently in her fashion, ought to be coming out
irrespective of the hour. It seemed to him that his wife must open
the door as his steps and his son's made themselves heard on the walk
between the box borders in their upper orchard, and he faltered a
little.

"Look here, father," said his son, detecting his hesitation. "Why don't
you let Mary come in with you, and help you find those things?"

"No, no," said Kenton, sinking into one of the wooden seats that flanked
the door-way. "I promised your mother that I would get them myself. You
know women don't like to have other women going through their houses."

"Yes, but Mary!" his son urged.

"Ah! It's just Mary, with her perfect housekeeping, that your mother
wouldn't like to have see the way she left things," said Kenton, and he
smiled at the notion of any one being housekeeper enough to find a flaw
in his wife's. "My, but this is pleasant!" he added. He took off his
hat and let the breeze play through the lank, thin hair which was still
black on his fine, high forehead. He was a very handsome old man, with
a delicate aquiline profile, of the perfect Roman type which is perhaps
oftener found in America than ever it was in Rome. "You've kept it very
nice, Dick," he said, with a generalizing wave of his hat.

"Well, I couldn't tell whether you would be coming back or not, and