at evening he informed his father that he would go South. "I'll get
those lands easy enough," he said.

A few days later Ferdy Wickersham got off the train at Ridgely, now
quite a flourishing little health-resort, and in danger of becoming a
fashionable one, and that afternoon he drove over to Squire Rawson's.

A number of changes had taken place in the old white-pillared house
since Ferdy had been an inmate. New furniture of black walnut
supplanted, at least on the first floor, the old horsehair sofa and
split-bottomed chairs and pine tables; a new plush sofa and a new piano
glistened in the parlor; large mirrors with dazzling frames hung on the
low walls, and a Brussels carpet as shiny as a bed of tulips, and as
stiff as the stubble of a newly cut hay-field, was on the floor.

But great as were these changes, they were not as great as that which
had taken place in the young person for whom they had been made.

When Ferdy Wickersham drove up to the door, there was a cry and a scurry
within, as Phrony Tripper, after a glance out toward the gate, dashed up
the stairs.

When Miss Euphronia Tripper, after a half-hour or more of careful and
palpitating work before her mirror, descended the old straight stairway,
she was a very different person from the round-faced, plump school-girl
whom Ferdy, as a lad, had flirted with under the apple-trees three or
four years before. She was quite as different as was the new piano with
its deep tones from the rattling old instrument that jingled and clanged
out of tune, or as the cool, self-contained, handsome young man in
faultless attire was from the slim, uppish boy who used to strum on it.
It was a very pretty and blushing young country maiden who now entered
quite accidentally the parlor where sat Mr. Ferdy Wickersham in calm and
indifferent discourse with her grandfather on the crops, on cattle, and
on the effect of the new railroad on products and prices.

Several sessions at a boarding-school of some pretension, with ambition
which had been awakened years before under the apple-trees, had given
Miss Phrony the full number of accomplishments that are to be gained by
such means. The years had also changed the round, school-girl plumpness
into a slim yet strong figure; and as she entered the parlor,--quite
casually, be it repeated,--with a large basket of flowers held
carelessly in one hand and a great hat shading her face, the blushes
that sprang to her cheeks at the wholly un