so he heralded himself to "My dear Uncle" by a letter signed
"Your loving nephew, Richard Venner," in which letter he told a very
frank story of travel and mercantile adventure, expressed much gratitude
for the excellent counsel and example which had helped to form his
character and preserve him in the midst of temptation, inquired
affectionately after his uncle's health, was much interested to know
whether his lively cousin who used to be his playmate had grown up as
handsome as she promised to be, and announced his intention of paying his
respects to them both at Rockland. Not long after this came the trunks
marked R. V. which he had sent before him, forerunners of his advent: he
was not going to wait for a reply or an invitation.

What a sound that is,--the banging down of the preliminary trunk, without
its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all personal
appendages, so long as the owner's hand or eye is on them! If it announce
the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight to look at it, to
sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a lone exile walking out
on a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman lying alongside, with the
colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he
sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near approach of
the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises
made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted
house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a
sense of knocking-kneed collapse with it as the thumping down in the
front entry of the heavy portmanteau, rammed with the changes of
uncounted coming weeks?

Whether the R. V. portmanteaus brought one or the other of these emotions
to the tenants of the Dudley mansion, it might not be easy to settle.
Elsie professed to be pleased with the thought of having an adventurous
young stranger, with stories to tell, an inmate of their quiet, not to
say dull, family. Under almost any other circumstances, her father would
have been unwilling to take a young fellow of whom he knew so little
under his roof; but this was his nephew, and anything that seemed like to
amuse or please Elsie was agreeable to him. He had grown almost
desperate, and felt as if any change in the current of her life and
feelings might save her from some strange paroxysm of dangerous mental
exaltation or sullen perversion of disposition, from which so