t of the square
round the corner toward Boylston Street. On the sloping front of the
case was inscribed an address, which seemed to gaze at Gaites with the
eyes of the girl whom it named and placed, and to whom in the young
man's willing fancy it attributed a charming quality. Nothing, he felt,
could be more suggestive, more expressive of something shy, something
proud, something pure, something pastoral yet patrician, something
unaffected and yet _chic_, in an unknown personality, than the legend:

Miss Phyllis Desmond,
Lower Merritt,
New Hampshire.

Via S. B. & H. C. R. R.

Like most lawyers, he had a vein of romance, and this now opened in
pleasing conjectures concerning the girl. He knew just where Lower
Merritt was, and so well what it was like that a vision of its white
paint against the dark green curtain of the wooded heights around it
filled his sense as agreeably as so much white marble. There was the
cottage of some summer people well above the village level, among pines
and birches, and overlooking the foamiest rush of the Saco, to which he
instantly destined the piano of Phyllis Desmond. He had never known that
these people's name was Desmond, and he had certainly never supposed
that they had a daughter called Phyllis; but he divined these facts in
losing sight of the truck; and he imagined with as logical probability
that one of the little girls whom he used to see playing on the
hill-slope before the cottage had grown up into the young lady whose
name the piano bore. There was quite time enough for this
transformation; it was seven years since Gaites had run up into the
White Mountains for a month's rest after his last term in the Harvard
Law School, and before beginning work in the office of the law firm in
New York where he had got a clerkship, and where he had now a junior
partnership. The little girl was then just ten years old, and now, of
course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached
Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it
was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those
nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in
character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites
smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown
legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over
her father's lawn, to the dignified young lady she