They did not know I would have an escort home. But do
come all the way, father will like to hear you talk about the places
you have visited."

"I travel, I don't visit places. I expect to go to London and Paris by
and by. Our buyer has been getting married and that doesn't please the
firm; he wanted to take his wife with him, but they vetoed that. They say
a married man will not attend strictly to business; see what a premium
is paid to bachelorhood. I shall understand laces well enough soon: I can
pick a piece of imitation out of a hundred real pieces now. Did Linnet
like the handkerchief and scarf?"

"You should have seen her! Hasn't she spoken of them?"

"No, she was too full of other things."

"Marriage isn't all in getting ready, to Linnet," said Marjorie,
seriously, "I found her crying one day because she was so happy and
didn't deserve to be."

"Will is a good fellow," said Hollis. "I wish I were half as good. But I
am so contradictory, so unsatisfied and so unsatisfying. I understand
myself better than I want to, and yet I do not understand myself at all."

"That is because you are _growing_," said Marjorie, with her wise air. "I
haven't settled down into a real Marjorie yet. I shouldn't know my own
picture unless I painted it myself."

"We are two rather dangerous people, aren't we?" laughed Hollis. "We will
steer clear of each other, as Will would say, until we can come to an
understanding."

"Unless we can help each other," Marjorie answered. "But I don't believe
you need to be pulled apart, but only to be let alone to grow--that is,
if the germ is perfect."

"A perfect germ!" he repeated. Hollis liked to talk about himself to any
one who would help him to self-analysis.

But the slowly moving figures were approaching, the black figure with
bent shoulders and a slouched hat, the tall slight figure at his side in
light gray with a shawl of white wool across her shoulders and drawn up
over her hair, the fleecy whiteness softening the lines of a face that
were already softened.

"O, Prudence, how far ahead we are of those two," exclaimed the
school-master, "and they are wiser than we, perhaps, because they do not
know so much."

"They do not know so much of each other, surely," she replied with a low
laugh. That very day Mr. Holmes had quoted to her, giving it a personal
application: "What she suffered she shook off in the sunshine."

He had been arguing within himself all day whether or not to