him her hand would she smile as
she had smiled last night? or would she stand demurely grave with down
dropped lashes?

The truth was that she did none of the things he had half expected of her.
She was sitting before a log fire, surrounded by a group of Harrisons and
Powells, who had been prevailed upon to spend the night, and when he
entered she gave him a sleepy little nod from the corner of a rosewood
sofa. As she lay back in the firelight she was like a drowsy kitten that
had just awakened from a nap. Though less radiant, her beauty was more
appealing, and as she stared at him with her large eyes blinking, he wanted
to stoop down and rock her off to sleep. He regarded her calmly this
morning, for, with all his tenderness, she did not fire his brain, and the
glory of the vision had passed away. Half angrily he asked himself if he
were in love with a pink dress and nothing more?

An hour afterward he came noisily into the library at Chericoke and aroused
the Major from his Horace by stamping distractedly about the room.

"Oh, it's all up with me, sir," he began despondently. "I might as well go
out and hang myself. I don't know what I want and yet I'm going mad because
I can't get it."

"Come, come," said the Major, soothingly. "I've been through it myself,
sir, and since your grandmother's out of earshot, I'd as well confess that
I've been through it more than once. Cheer up, cheer up, you aren't the
first to dare the venture--_Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_, you know."

His assurance was hardly as comforting as he had intended it to be. "Oh, I
dare say, there've been fools enough before me," returned Dan, impatiently,
as he flung himself out of the room.

He grew still more impatient when the day came for him to return to
college; and as they started out on horseback, with Zeke and Big Abel
riding behind their masters, he declared irritably that the whole system of
education was a nuisance, and that he "wished the ark had gone down with
all the ancient languages on board."

"There would still be law," suggested Morson, pleasantly. "So cheer up,
Beau, there's something left for you to learn."

Then, as they passed Uplands, they turned, with a single impulse, and
cantered up the broad drive to the portico. Betty and Virginia were in the
library; and as they heard the horses, they came running to the window and
threw it open.

"So you will come back in the summer--all of you," said Virginia,
hopefully, and a