ing till he could see her effect on us and ours on her.
Tell me frankly, dear, how do you like her?"

The Yankee widow had bright black eyes and they twinkled with restrained
enthusiasm as she murmured, "I hope she'll get him!"

"Ah!" Mrs. Fair smiled gratefully, made a pretty mouth and ended with a
wise gesture and a dubious toss, as who should say, "I admit he's
priceless, but I hope he may get her."

Whereupon the widow ventured one question more, and Mrs. Fair told her
of John March. "Yes," she said at the end, "he happened to be in Boston
for his company last Saturday when Miss Garnet was with us, and Henry
brought him to the house. I wasn't half glad, though I like him, quite.
He's a big, handsome, swinging fellow that everybody invites to
everything. He makes good speeches before the clubs and flaunts his
Southern politics just enough to please our Yankee fondness for being
politely _sassed_."

"Why, dear, isn't that a rather good trait in us? It's zest for the
overlooked fact, isn't it?"

"O!--it has its uses. It certainly furnishes a larger feeling of
superiority to both sides at once than anything else I know of."

"You say Henry brought him to the house while Miss Garnet was with
you----"

"Yes; and, my dear, I wish you might have seen those two Southerners
meet! They didn't leave us any feeling of superiority then; at least
_he_ didn't. Except that they're both so Southern, they're not alike.
She moved right in among us without the smallest misstep. He made a
dozen delicious blunders. It was lovely to see how sweetly she and Henry
helped him up and brushed him off, and the boyish manfulness with which
he always took it. I couldn't tell, sometimes, which of the three to
like best."

Those behind called them to hearken to the notes of a woodlark, and when
Mrs. Fair asked her son the hour it was time to get to the station.
Barbara would not say just when she could be in Boston again; but the
classmate she liked best was a Boston girl, and by the time this college
life had lasted six weeks her visits to the city had been three, as
aforesaid. In every instance, with an unobtrusiveness all his own, Henry
Fair had made her pleasure his business. On the second visit she had
expected to meet Mr. March again--a matter wholly of his contriving--but
had only got his telegram from New York at the last moment of her stay,
stating that he was unavoidably detained by business, and leaving space
for six words unuse