dashed his pen through
a harsh expression. Now and then he added an explanation or qualified
abroad statement. But his mind was on the logical side-track, and he
followed the chain of reasoning without fairly perceiving where it would
lead him, if he carried it into real life.

He was just touching up the final proposition, when his granddaughter,
Letty, once before referred to, came into the room with her smiling face
and lively movement. Miss Letty or Letitia Forrester was a city-bred
girl of some fifteen or sixteen years old, who was passing the summer
with her grandfather for the sake of country air and quiet. It was a
sensible arrangement; for, having the promise of figuring as a belle by
and by, and being a little given to dancing, and having a voice which
drew a pretty dense circle around the piano when she sat down to play and
sing, it was hard to keep her from being carried into society before her
time, by the mere force of mutual attraction. Fortunately, she had some
quiet as well as some social tastes, and was willing enough to pass two
or three of the summer months in the country, where she was much better
bestowed than she would have been at one of those watering-places where
so many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of
self-consciousness.

Miss Letty was altogether too wholesome, hearty, and high-strung a young
girl to be a model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic pattern
which is the classical type of certain excellent young females, often the
subjects of biographical memoirs. But the old minister was proud of his
granddaughter for all that. She was so full of life, so graceful, so
generous, so vivacious, so ready always to do all she could for him and
for everybody, so perfectly frank in her avowed delight in the pleasures
which this miserable world offered her in the shape of natural beauty, of
poetry, of music, of companionship, of books, of cheerful cooperation in
the tasks of those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could not find it
in his heart to condemn her because she was deficient in those particular
graces and that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes noticed in
feeble young persons suffering from various chronic diseases which
impaired their vivacity and removed them from the range of temptation.

When Letty, therefore, came bounding into the old minister's study, he
glanced up from his manuscript, and, as his eye fell upon her, it flashed
across