ut up the kit--hev you?" He stood in front
of the fireplace staring with apparent interest at the place where the
kit had been, and added in a voice which he strove to make quite casual,
"How be Jethro?"

"He looks older, Cousin Eph," she answered, after a pause, "and I think
he is very tired. But he seems he seems more tranquil and contented than
I hoped to find him."

"I want to know," said Ephraim. "I am glad to hear it. Glad you went up,
Cynthy--you done right to go.

"I'd have gone with you, if you'd only told me. I'll git a chance to go
up Sunday."

There was an air of repressed excitement about the veteran which did
not escape Cynthia. He held two letters in his hand, and, being a
postmaster, he knew the handwriting on both. One had come from that
place in New Jersey, and drew no comment. But the other! That one had
been postmarked at the capital, and as he had sat at his counter at the
post-office waiting for closing time he had turned it over and over with
many ejaculations and futile guesses. Past master of dissimulation that
he was, he had made up his mind--if he should find Cynthia at home--to
lay the letters indifferently on the table and walk into his bedroom.
This campaign he now proceeded to carry out.

Cynthia smiled again when he was gone, and shook her head and picked
up the letters: Bob's was uppermost and she read that first, without a
thought of the other one. And she smiled as she read for Bob had had
a promotion. He was not yet at the head of the locomotive works, he
hastened to add, for fear that Cynthia might think that Mr. Broke had
resigned the presidency in his favor; and Cynthia never failed to laugh
at these little facetious asides. He was now earning the princely sum of
ninety dollars a month--not enough to marry on, alas! On Saturday nights
he and Percy Broke scrubbed as much as possible of the grime from their
hands and faces and went to spend Sunday at Elberon, the Broke place on
the Hudson; from whence Miss Sally Broke, if she happened to be at home,
always sent Cynthia her love. As Cynthia is still a heroine, I shall
not describe how she felt about Sally Broke's love. There was plenty
of Bob's own in the letter. Cynthia would got have blamed him if he
bad fallen in love with Miss Broke. It seemed to her little short of
miraculous that, amidst such surroundings, he could be true to her.

After a period which was no briefer than that usually occupied by Bob's
letters, Cynthia to