-and reaching a file of letters in his
cabinet, he lays before his companion that fragment of the Doctor's
epistle which had spoken of the rosary, and of his discovery that it had
been the gift of the mother, "so near, and he trusted dear a relative."

_"Mais, comme il est innocent_, your good old friend there!"

"I wish to God, Pierre, I were as innocent as he," said Maverick, and
tossed his cigar over the edge of the balcony.

* * * * *

Upon his arrival at New York, Maverick did not communicate directly with
the Doctor, enjoying the thought, very likely, of surprising his old
friend by his visit, very much as he had surprised him many years
before. He takes boat to a convenient point upon the shore of the Sound,
and thence chooses to approach the town that holds what is most dear to
him by an old, lumbering stage-coach, which still plies across the
hills, as twenty years before, through the parish of Ashfield. The same
patches of tasselled corn, (it is August,) the same outlying bushy
pastures, the same reeling walls of mossy cobble-stones meet his eye
that he remembered on his previous visit. But he looks upon all wayside
views carelessly,--as one seeing, and yet not seeing them.

His daughter Adele, she who parted from him a toy-child eight years
gone, whom a new ribbon would amuse in that day, must have changed. That
she has not lost her love of him, those letters have told; that she has
not lost her girlish buoyancy, he knows. She must be tall now, and
womanly in stature, he thinks. She promised to be graceful. That he will
love her, he feels; but will he be proud of her? A fine figure, a sweet,
womanly voice, an arch look, a winning smile, a pretty coquetry of
glance,--will he find these? And does he not build his pride on hope of
these? Will she be clever? Will there be traces, ripened in these last
years, of the mother,--offensive traces possibly?

But Maverick is what the world calls a philosopher; he hums,
unconsciously, a snatch of a French song, by which he rouses the
attention of the spectacled old lady, (the only other occupant of the
coach,) with whom he has already made some conversational ventures, and
who has just finished a lunch which she has drawn from her capacious
work-bag. Reviving now under the influence of Maverick's chance fragment
of song, and dusting the crumbs from her lap, she says,--

"We don't have very good singin' now in the Glostenbury meetin'."