the desire to tease her, and treated her as he had never
done before. Thinking of this, not long afterward, he wondered whether a
presentiment of what was coming had caused the change, or whether it
merely arose from a consciousness of the gloom which had already settled
on the household.

During his call on the Barndollars that morning, he had partly overcome
Elsa's unfavorable impression of him by treating her, to some extent,
"like a grown-up woman" and showing by his manner that he was not
unconscious of the handsome young brunette's personal attractions. On
her next visit, a little more than two weeks later, she noticed that he
had entirely given up the objectionable teasings; and this removed the
last obstacle in the way of her considering him extremely "nice." She
had mentally admitted, even at the first view, that he possessed the
degree of good looks and stylishness rigorously exacted from the male
sex by the canons of boarding school taste, and she now candidly
acknowledged to herself that his being an Englishman was, strictly
speaking, not his own fault.

When she was ready to go, she made her adieux with an agreeable sense of
having been both entertaining and instructive. She forgot to take leave
of her friend the aged and decrepit mastiff, which was sitting just
inside the hall; but he called attention to his presence by three raps
of his tail on the floor. Elsa laughed, and went through the form of
shaking his huge paw,--an attention which he acknowledged by a prolonged
caudal tattoo.

"Oh, Rena!" said Elsa, stopping on the topmost step, "I forgot to tell
you what happened to our Scotch shepherd-dog, Macbeth. You know Melker
and I made friends with him the first day, but we were the only ones
he'd be intimate with. Well, about two weeks ago an ugly old black dog
came prowling around the house, and when Mac went up to it it bit him
and then ran away to the mountains. Soon after that, we heard that a
black dog with the hydrophobia had been killed up there, and Derrick and
Jake said they believed it was the same one. Melker was in Philadelphia,
and before he came home Mac went mad. Derrick shot at him out of the
barn, and scared him so much that he ran off down the road, and we
haven't heard anything about him since."

Rena was bending over one of the jessamine-bushes, and seemed to be
absorbed in removing some dead leaves.

"Did your dog come this way, Elsa?" asked Mrs. Reinfelter nervously.

"No, in