ving his handkerchief to attract
her attention.

As she saw the kindly face she smiled and shook her hand. There was a
motion of inquiry: "Shall I come round?" And a very resolute telegraphing
by the head back again: "No, no!" There was another question, in the
language of shoulders, and handkerchief, and hands: "What on earth are
you doing up there?" The answer was prompt and intelligible: "Nothing
that I am ashamed of." Still there came another message of motion from
below, which Amy, knowing Lawrence Newt, unconsciously interpreted to
herself thus: "I know you, angel of mercy! You have brought some angelic
soup to some poor woman." The only reply was a smile that shone down from
the window into the heart of the merchant who stood below. The smile was
followed by a wave of the hand from above that said farewell. Lawrence
Newt looked up and kissed his own, but the smiling face was gone.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CAMPAIGN.

Miss Fanny Newt went to Saratoga with a perfectly clear idea of what she
intended to do. She intended to be engaged to Mr. Alfred Dinks.

That young gentleman was a second cousin of Hope Wayne's, and his mother
had never objected to his little visits at Pinewood, when both he and
Hope were young, and when the unsophisticated human heart is flexible as
melted wax, and receives impressions which only harden with time.

"Let the children play together, my dear," she said, in conjugal
seclusion to her husband, the Hon. Budlong Dinks, who needed only
sufficient capacity and a proper opportunity to have been one of the most
distinguished of American diplomatists. He thought he was such already.
There was, indeed, plenty of diplomacy in the family, and that most
skillful of all diplomatic talents, the management of distinguished
diplomatists, was not unknown there.

Fanny Newt had made the proper inquiries. The result was that there were
rumors--"How _do_ such stories start?" asked Mrs. Budlong Dinks of all
her friends who were likely to repeat the rumor--that it was a family
understanding that Mr. Alfred Dinks and his cousin Hope were to make a
match. "And they _do_ say," said Mrs. Dinks, "what ridiculous things
people are! and they _do_ say that, for family reasons, we are going to
keep it all quiet! What a world it is!"

The next day Mrs. Cod told Mrs. Dod, in a morning call, that Mrs. Budlong
Dinks said that the engagement between her son Alfred and his cousin Hope
Wayne was kept quiet for fam