d in a frame of luxuriant Virginia-creeper, and smiled and nodded
graciously to her departing guests, while wondering if they would
meet her son coming home. After that followed a reflection as to the
undesirability of either of them as a possible daughter-in-law.

Just as she was turning to enter the house, after the coach had
rolled out of sight, she saw her son coming down the street under the
green shade of the maples which bordered it. The mother went toddling
on her tiny feet down the steps to the gate to meet her son. The
house stood quite close to the road; indeed, only a little
bricked-path separated it from the sidewalk. All the ground was at
the sides and back. The house was a square old affair with a row of
half-windows in the third-story, or attic, and considerable good old
panel-work and ornamentation about it. On the right side of the house
was a large old flower-garden, now just beginning to assert itself
anew; on the left were the stable and some out-buildings, with a
grassy oval of lawn in the centre of a sweep of drive; in the rear
was a kitchen-garden and a field rising to the railroad, for
railroads circled all Banbridge in their vises of iron arms. A
station was only a short distance farther up this same street. As
Mrs. Anderson stood waiting and her son was advancing down the street
a train from the city rumbled past. When Randolph had come up, and
they had both entered the house, a carriage passed swiftly and both
saw it from the parlor window.

"Do you know who's carriage that is?" asked Mrs. Anderson. "It is
something new in Banbridge, isn't it?"

"It belongs to those new people who have moved into the Ranger
place," replied Randolph. He wore a light business-suit which suited
him, and he looked like a gentleman, as much so as when he had come
from a law-office instead of a grocery-store. Indeed, he had been
much shabbier in the law-office and had not held his head so high. In
the law-office he had constantly been confronted with the possibility
of debt. Here he was free from it. He had been smoking, as usual, and
there was about his garments an odor of mingled coffee and tobacco.
He had been selling coffee, and grinding some. One of his two
salesmen was ill, and that was why he was so late. The new carriage
rolled silently on its rubber tires along the macadamized road; the
high black polish and plate-glass flashed in the sunlight, the
coachman in livery sat proudly erect and held his whip