e for a
long time, and they have both joined in the friendliest kind of letter
on his marriage to their former pastor, if that was what Breckon was.
They have professed to know from the first that he was in love with
Ellen, and that he is in love with her now is the strong present belief
of his flock, if they are a flock, and if they may be said to have
anything so positive as a belief in regard to anything.

Judge Kenton has given the Elroys the other corner of the lot, and
has supplied them the means of building on it. Mary and Lottie run
diagonally into the home-house every day, and nothing keeps either from
coming into authority over the old people except the fear of each other
in which they stand. The Kentons no longer make any summer journeys, but
in the winter they take Boyne and go to see Ellen in New York. They do
not stay so long as Mrs. Kenton would like. As soon as they have fairly
seen the Breckons, and have settled comfortably down in their pleasant
house on West Seventy-fourth Street, she detects him in a secret habit
of sighing, which she recognizes as the worst symptom of homesickness,
and then she confides to Ellen that she supposes Mr. Kenton will
make her go home with him before long. Ellen knows it is useless
to interfere. She even encourages her father's longings, so far as
indulging his clandestine visits to the seedsman's, and she goes with
him to pick up second-hand books about Ohio in the War at the dealers',
who remember the judge very flatteringly.

As February draws on towards March it becomes impossible to detain
Kenton. His wife and son return with him to Tuskingum, where Lottie
has seen to the kindling of a good fire in the furnace against their
arrival, and has nearly come to blows with Mary about provisioning them
for the first dinner. Then Mrs. Kenton owns, with a comfort which she
will not let her husband see, that there is no place like home, and they
take up their life in the place where they have been so happy and so
unhappy. He reads to her a good deal at night, and they play a game
of checkers usually before they go to bed; she still cheats without
scruple, for, as she justly says, he knows very well that she cannot
bear to be beaten.

The colonel, as he is still invariably known to his veterans, works
pretty faithfully at the regimental autobiography, and drives round the
country, picking up material among them, in a buggy plastered with
mud. He has imagined, since his last v