ix
years had passed since he was last there; six years--and time had not
dulled the sensation of that white pepper in his nostrils! He smiled to
himself. He must see Aileen before he left, for from time to time he had
heard good reports of her from his mother with whom she had become a
favorite. He thought she must be mighty plucky to stand Aunt Meda all
this time! He gathered from various sources that Mrs. Champney was
growing peculiar as she approached three score and ten. Her rare letters
to him, however, were kind enough. But he was sure Aileen's anomalous
place in the household at Champ-au-Haut--neither servant nor child of
the house, never adopted, but only maintained--could have been no
sinecure. Anyway, he knew she had kept the devotion of her two admirers,
Romanzo Caukins and Octavius Buzzby. From a hint in his aunt's last
letter, he drew the conclusion that Aileen and Romanzo would make a
match of it before long, when Romanzo should be established. At any
rate, Aileen had wit enough, he was sure, to know on which side her
bread was buttered, and from all he heard by the way of letters, Romanzo
Caukins was not to be sneezed at as a prospective husband--a
steady-going, solid sort of a chap who, he was told, had a chance now
like himself in the quarry business. He must credit Aunt Meda with this
one bit of generosity, at least; Mr. Van Ostend told him she had applied
to him for some working position for Romanzo in the Flamsted office, and
not in vain; he was about to be put in as pay-master.

As he drove slowly up the highroad towards The Gore, he saw the
stone-cutters' sheds stretching dim and gray in the moonlight along the
farther shore. A standing train of loaded flat-cars gleamed in the
electric light like a long high-piled drift of new-fallen snow. Here and
there, on approaching The Gore, an arc-light darkened the hills round
about and sent its blinding glare into the traveller's eyes. At last,
his home was in sight--his home!--he wondered that he did not experience
a greater thrill of home-coming--and behind and above it the many
electric lights in and around the quarries produced hazy white
reflections concentrated in luminous spots on the clear sky.

His mother met him on the porch. Her greeting was such that it caused
him to feel, and for the first time, that where she was, there,
henceforth, his true home must ever be.

* * * * *

"It will be hard work adjusting mysel