m on the shoulder, "father--will
you give me Doris, for your claim is first? Will you accept me as her
lover, sometime to be her husband, always to be your son, and your
daughter?"

Winthrop Adams rose half-bewildered. Had the secret hope of his soul
unfolded in blessed fruition? He looked from one to the other, then his
glance rested on his son--their eyes met, and in that instant they came
to know each other as they never had before, to understand, to
comprehend all that was in the tie of nature. He laid one hand on his
son's shoulder, the other clasped the slim virginal figure, no longer a
little girl, but whose girlhood and affectionate devotion would always
fill both hearts.

"Doris, my child--you are quite sure----" He could not have his son
defrauded of any sweetness.

Doris raised her downcast eyes and smiled, while the pink flush was like
a rosy gleam of sunrise. Then she laid her hand over both of the others'
in a tender, caressing fashion. But she was too deeply moved for words.

Winthrop Adams kissed her fair brow, but her lover kissed her on the
sweet, rosy lips.

They announced the engagement almost at once. It was done partly for De
la Maur's sake, though after the first he took it quite philosophically.
There were three people supremely happy over it. Miss Recompense, Madam
Royall,--who declared she would have been disappointed in Providence if
it had been any other way,--and Cousin Betty, who was happy as a queen
in her own life, though why we should make royalty a synonym for
happiness I do not know.

"You never could have left Uncle Win," wrote Betty, "and Cary could not
have gone away, neither could he have brought home a strange woman. This
was the only satisfactory ending. But I hope you will be awfully in
love with each other and sweet--and silly and all that. I am sorry for
Captain Hawthorne, for, Doris, he loved you sincerely, but your French
cousin can console himself with an English rhyme:

"'If she be not fair for me,
What care I how fair she be?'"

And oddly enough a few months later he did console himself with Eudora
Chapman.

Just a few years afterward there was a great time in Boston. For she had
adopted a charter and become a real city, after long and earnest
discussion. There was a grand celebration and no end of dinners, and
young Cary Adams made one of the addresses. Mr. Winthrop Adams insisted
that his life work was done, but he lived to be interested in many more