eep within his heart.

There is a little more to be told of this part of the story.
Mrs. Annesley, Tom's aunt, being a woman whose knowledge of human
nature and power of sympathy made her a woman of the world rather than
of any smaller circle,--Mrs. Annesley was delighted with Nancy's
unaffected pleasure and self-forgetful dignity of behavior at the
dancing-school. She took her back to the fine house, and they had half
an hour together there, and only parted because Nancy was to spend the
night with cousin Snow, and another old friend of her mother's was to
be asked to tea. Mrs. Annesley asked her to come to see her again,
whenever she was in Boston, and Nancy gratefully promised, but she
never came. "I'm all through with Boston for this time," she said,
with an amused smile, at parting. "I'm what one of our neighbors calls
'all flustered up,'" and she looked eagerly in her new friend's kind
eyes for sympathy. "Now that I've seen this beautiful house, and you
and Mr. Aldis, and some pretty dancin', I want to go right home where
I belong."

Tom Aldis meant to write to Nancy when his engagement came out, but he
never did; and he meant to send a long letter to her and her mother
two years later, when he and his wife were going abroad for a long
time; but he had an inborn hatred of letter-writing, and let that
occasion pass also, though when anything made him very sorry or very
glad, he had a curious habit of thinking of these East Rodney friends.
Before he went to Europe he used to send them magazines now and then,
or a roll of illustrated papers; and one day, in a bookstore, he
happened to see a fine French book with colored portraits of famous
dancers, and sent it by express to Nancy with his best remembrances.
But Tom was young and much occupied, the stream of time floated him
away from the shore of Maine, not toward it, ten or fifteen years
passed by, his brown hair began to grow gray, and he came back from
Europe after a while to a new Boston life in which reminiscences of
East Rodney seemed very remote indeed.

III.

One summer afternoon there were two passengers, middle-aged men, on
the small steamer James Madison, which attended the comings and goings
of the great Boston steamer, and ran hither and yon on errands about
Penobscot Bay. She was puffing up a long inlet toward East Rodney
Landing, and the two strangers were observing the green shores with
great interest. Like nearly the whole stretch of the Maine