uch not only life as it
innocently rioted here to-night, but all life, his own in the midst of
it. At once he knew. These were the very old, and those who had lived
through their fostering were paying them beautiful tribute.

At that moment his nephew, boyishly changed, but not disguised, in old
Judge Hadley's coat and knee-breeches, stepped out of the moving line, a
lady with him, and came to him. Clyde, too, was flushed with the
strangeness of it all, and the joyous certainty that now for an evening,
if only that, Nellie Lake was with him. The colonel looked at her and
looked again, and she dropped her eyes in a pretty, serious modesty.

"Ellen!" he said involuntarily.

Then she laughed.

"That's my aunt," she told him. "I'm Elinor. I'm Nell. I tried to look
like auntie. I guess I do."

"No," said the colonel sharply, "you don't look like Ellen Bayliss.
You've made up too old."

Yet she had not, and he knew it. She had only put a little powder on her
hair and drawn its curling richness into a seemly knot. She had whitened
the bloom of her cheeks, and taken on that little pathetic droop of the
shoulders he remembered in Ellen Bayliss the day he saw her in his last
hurried trip to Marshmead. He had not spoken to her then. She had passed
the station as he was driving away, and he had felt a pang he deadened
with some anodyne of grim endurance, to see how youth could wilt into a
dowerless middle age.

"I guess you haven't seen aunt Ellen," said Nellie innocently. "I'm just
as she is every day, but she's made up to-night to be like grandma, or
the picture of aunt Sue that died."

There she was. She had left the moving line for a moment, and the
minister, in robe and bands of an ancient time, devised by Ann Bartlett
and made by Lydia Vesey, had bowed and left her for some of his
multifarious social claims. A chair was beside her, but she only rested
one hand on the back of it and leaned her head against the wall. She was
in a faded brocade unearthed from some dark corner Lydia Vesey knew the
secret of, and she was age itself, beautiful, delicate, acquiescent age,
all sadness and a wistful grace. The colonel looked at her, savagely
almost, with the pain of it, and then back again at the girl who seemed
to be picturing the first sad stage of undefended maidenhood. At that
moment he knew he had put something wonderful away from him, those years
ago, when he ceased to court the look in Ellen's eyes and turned to a
rob