hurch. It's more
like the old Puritan spirit.--Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!"

"Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!" said Mrs.
Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care
for them.

"I always forget that you're a Bostonian," Miss Anderson apologized.

"Oh, thank you!" cried Mrs. Pasmer.

"I'm going to try to make her like other girls," continued Miss
Anderson.

"Do," said Alice's mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the
undertaking.

"If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and
a little under fifty, it would be easier," said Miss Anderson
thoughtfully. "But how are you going to make a girl like other girls
when there are no young men?"

"That's very true," said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of
course did her best to make impersonal. "Do you think there will be
more, later on?"

"They will have to Huey up if they are comin'," said Miss Anderson.
"It's the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in
September."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appeared
over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and
departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.

She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedly
that Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top of
the broad hotel steps.

"What is it, Alice?"

"Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat."

"Mr. Munt?"

"Yes." She would not stay for further question.

Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth till
she disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat down
near the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging on
the balustrade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of the
precipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with a
polite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillful
astonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected to
see, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she was
pleased with them, but because she was still more pleased with
her daughter's being, after all, like other girls, when it came to
essentials.

XII.

Alice came down to lunch in a dress which reconciled the seaside and the
drawing-room in an effect entirely satisfactory to her mother, and gave
her hand to both the gentlemen without the affe