o Southerner of her father's
generation ever sent his brother, no Southerness her sister, without
some fear of apostasy.

Barbara had made three visits to that city, where Mrs. Fair, the ladies
said, "did a great deal for her." Yet when Mrs. Fair said, with kind
elation, "My dear, you have met Boston, and it is yours!" the smiling
exile, as she put her hand into both hands of her hostess, remembered
older friends and silently apologized to herself for having so lost her
heart to this new one.

At that point came in one who was at least an older acquaintance--the
son. Thoroughly as Barbara had always liked Henry Fair, he seemed to her
to have saved his best attractiveness until now, and with a gentleness
as masculine as it was refined, fitted into his beautiful home, his
city, the whole environing country, indeed, and shone from them, in her
enlivened fancy, like an ancestor's portrait from its frame. He came to
take her to an exhibition of paintings, and thence to the railway
station, where a fellow-student was to rejoin her for the trip back to
college. Mrs. Fair had to attend a meeting of the society for something
or other, of which she was president.

"These people make every minute count," wrote Barbara to Fannie; "and
yet they're far from being always at work. I'm learning the art of
recreation from them. Even the men have a knack for it that our Southern
men know nothing about."

"You might endorse that 'Fair _versus_ March,'" replied Ravenel to his
wife, one evening, as he lingered a moment at tea. She had playfully
shown him the passage as a timorous hint at better self-care; but he
smilingly rose and went out. She kept a bright face, and as she sat
alone re-reading the letter, said, laughingly, "Poor John!" and a full
minute afterward, without knowing it, sighed.

This may have been due, in part at least, to the fact that Barbara's
long but tardy letter was the first one Fannie had received from her. It
told how a full correspondence between the writer's father and his
fellow college president had made it perfectly comfortable for her to
appear at the institution for the first time quite unescorted, having
within the hour parted from Mr. and Mrs. Fair, who, though less than
three hours' run from their own home, would have gone with her if she
could have consented. She had known that the dormitories were full and
that like many other students she would have to make her home with a
private family, and had f