mon, "and I hope we shall be neighborly. I s'pose you'll
live here?"

Eloise received her graciously, and said she should never forget her
kindness, and told her some incidents of her journey, and, as Mrs. Biggs
reported to Tim, "treated me as if I was just as good as she, if she is
a Crompton."

Ruby Ann came later in the day, genuinely glad for Eloise, and sure
that nothing would ever change the young girl's friendship for herself,
no matter what her position might be. Many others called that day and
the following Monday, and Eloise received them with a dignity of which
she was herself unconscious, and which they charged to the Crompton
blood. Howard, who was still suffering from a severe cold, kept his room
until Jack returned. Then he came out with a feeling of humiliation, not
so much that he had lost the estate, as that he had thought to burn the
paper which took it from him. This feeling, however, gradually wore off
under Jack's geniality and Eloise's friendliness, and Amy's sweetness of
manner as she called him Cousin Howard, and said she hoped he would look
upon Crompton as his home. Then he was to have twenty thousand dollars
when matters were adjusted, and that was something to one who, when he
came to Crompton, had scarcely a dollar. His visit had paid, and, though
he was not the master, he was the favored guest and cousin, who, at
Eloise's request, took charge of affairs after Jack went home to New
York.

Early in December Jake came from the South, and was welcomed warmly by
Amy and Eloise. To the servants he was a great curiosity, with his negro
dialect and quaint ways, but no one could look at the old man's honest
face without respecting him. Even Peter, who detected about him an order
of the bad tobacco which had so offended his nostrils in the letters to
his master, and who on general principles disliked negroes, was disarmed
of his prejudices by Jake's confiding simplicity and thorough goodness.
Taking him one day for a drive around the country and through the
village, he bought him some first-class cigars with the thought "Maybe
they'll take that smell out of his clothes."

"Thankee, Mas'r Peter, thankee," Jake said, smacking his lips with his
enjoyment of the flavor of the Havanas. "Dis yer am mighty fine, but I
s'pecks I or'to stick to my backy. I done brought a lot wid me."

He smoked the Havanas as long as they lasted, with no special diminution
of odor as Peter could discover, and then retur