summer home there nearly
twenty years. Lower Merritt was one of the first places opened up in
that part of the mountains, and I guess the Desmonds built the first
cottage there."

The date given would make the young lady whom he remembered from her
childhood romps on her father's lawn somewhat older than he imagined,
but not too old for the purposes of his romance.

The speaker began to collect her needlework into the handkerchief on her
lap as she went on, and he listened with an intensified abandon.

"I guess," she continued, "that they pass most of the year there. After
he lost his money, he had to give up his house in town, and I believe
they have no other home now. They did use to travel some, winters, but I
guess they don't much any more; if they don't stay there the whole
winter through, I don't believe they get much farther now than Portland,
or Burymouth, at the furthest. It seems to me as if I heard that one of
the girls was going to Boston last winter to take piano lessons at the
Conservatory, so as to teach; but--"

She stopped with a definite air, and rolled her knitting up into her
handkerchief. Gaites made a merit to himself of rising abruptly and
closing his paper with a clash, as if he had been trying to read and had
not been able for the talking near him. The ladies looked round
conscience-stricken; when they saw who it was, they looked indignant.

V.

In the necessity, which we all feel, of making practical excuses to
ourselves for a foolish action, he pretended that he had been at
Craybrooks long enough, and that now, since he had derived all the
benefit to be got from the west-side air, it was best to begin his
homestretch on the other slope of the hills. His real reason was that he
wished to stop at Lower Merritt and experience whatever fortuities might
happen to him from doing so. He wished, in other words, to see Phyllis
Desmond, or, failing this, to find out whether her piano had reached
her.

It had now a pathos for him which had been wanting earlier in his
romance. It was no longer a gay surprise for a young girl's birthday; it
was the sober means of living to a woman who must work for her living.
But he found it not the less charming for that; he had even a more
romantic interest in it, mingled with the sense of patronage, of
protection, which is so agreeable to a successful man.

He began to long for some new occasion of promoting the arrival of the
piano in Lower Merritt, and h