e cheeks and a little additional life in the grave
soft eyes; and she wished Tom heartily at a distance.

At a distance, however, he was no more that day. He made himself
gracefully busy indeed with the rest of his mother's guests; but after
they quitted the table, he contrived to be at Lois's side, and asked if
she would not like to see the greenhouse? It was a welcome proposition,
and while nobody at the moment paid any attention to the two young
people, they passed out by a glass door at the other end of the
dining-room into the conservatory, while the stream of guests went the
other way. Then Lois was plunged in a wilderness of green leafage and
brilliant bloom, warm atmosphere and mixed perfume; her first breath
was an involuntary exclamation of delight and relief.

"Ah! you like this better than the other room, don't you?" said Tom.

Lois did not answer; however, she went with such an absorbed expression
from one plant to another, that Tom must needs conclude she liked this
better than the other company too.

"I never saw such a beautiful greenhouse," she said at last, "nor so
large a one."

"_This_ is not much," replied Tom. "Most of our plants are in the
country--where I have come from to-day; this is just a city affair.
Shampuashuh don't cultivate exotics, then?"

"O no! Nor anything much, except the needful."

"That sounds rather--tiresome," said Tom.

"O, it is not tiresome. One does not get tired of the needful, you
know."

"Don't you! _I_ do," said Tom. "Awfully. But what do you do for
pleasure then, up there in Shampuashuh?"

"Pleasure? O, we have it--I have it-- But we do not spend much time in
the search of it. O how beautiful! what is that?"

"It's got some long name--Metrosideros, I believe. What _do_ you do for
pleasure up there then, Miss Lothrop?"

"Dig clams."

"Clams!" cried Tom.

"Yes. Long clams. It's great fun. But I find pleasure all over."

"How come you to be such a philosopher?"

"That is not philosophy."

"What is it? I can tell you, there isn't a girl in New York that would
say what you have just said."

Lois thought the faces around the lunch table had quite harmonized with
this statement. She forgot them again in a most luxuriant trailing
Pelargonium covered with large white blossoms of great elegance.

"But it is philosophy that makes you not drink wine? Or don't you like
it?"

"O no," said Lois, "it is not philosophy; it is humanity."

"How? I think it is h