nd then his sister Eunice came out, and he could not
speak. They all went together into the house flaming with naphtha gas,
and with the steam heat already on, and Dan said he would take his bag
to his room, and then come down again. He knew that he had left them to
think that there was something very mysterious in his coming, and while
he washed away the grime of his journey he was planning how to appear
perfectly natural when he should get back to his sisters. He recollected
that he had not asked either them or his father how his mother was, but
it was certainly not because his mind was not full of her. Alice now
seemed very remote from him, further even than his gun, or his boyish
collection of moths and butterflies, on which his eye fell in roving
about his room. For a bitter instant it seemed to him as if they were
all alike toys, and in a sudden despair he asked himself what had become
of his happiness. It was scarcely half a day since he had parted in
transport from Alice.

He made pretexts to keep from returning at once to his sisters, and it
was nearly half an hour before he went down to them. By that time his
father was with them in the library, and they were waiting tea for him.

XXIX.

A family of rich people in the country, apart from intellectual
interests, is apt to gormandise; and the Maverings always sat down to a
luxurious table, which was most abundant and tempting at the meal they
called tea, when the invention of the Portuguese man-cook was taxed
to supply the demands of appetites at once eager and fastidious. They
prolonged the meal as much as possible in winter, and Dan used to like
to get home just in time for tea when he came up from Harvard; it was
always very jolly, and he brought a boy's hunger to its abundance. The
dining-room, full of shining light, and treated from the low-down
grate, was a pleasant place. But now his spirits failed to rise with
the physical cheer; he was almost bashfully silent; he sat cowed in the
presence of his sisters, and careworn in the place where he used to be
so gay and bold. They were waiting to have him begin about himself, as
he always did when he had been away, and were ready to sympathise with
his egotism, whatever new turn it took. He mystified them by asking
about them and their affairs, and by dealing in futile generalities,
instead of launching out with any business that he happened at the time
to be full of. But he did not attend to their answer