gh I haven't the least idea what his age was."

"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.

"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.

"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte
explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness
which her mother's imagination supplied.

"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon?
Did you inquire who he was or where?"

"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several
impossibilities under one head in her answer.

"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."

"But I didn't _think_ he was the one, and I don't _know_ that he is
now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"

"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've
always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not
ungenerousness."

Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really,
mother!"

Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not
the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you.
The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the
undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or
the young man's identity.

It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with
Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the
inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure
to do so was the more important because the young man had come back
and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The
palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and
as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with
the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a
number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record
to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the
room.

When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he
interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way;
and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got
white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so
conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong
curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made
way for convers