Master Philip Hayn retired from his second evening in New York society with feelings very different from those which his rather heavy heart and head had carried down to Sol Mantring’s sloop only a short week before. No one called him “country” or looked curiously at his attire; on the contrary, at least one lady, in a late party that boarded the elevated train on which he was returning to his hotel, regarded him with evident admiration. Not many days before, even this sort of attention would have made him uncomfortable, but the experiences of his evening at Miss Dinon’s had impressed him with the probability that he would be to a certain degree an object of admiration, and he was already prepared to accept it as a matter of course,--very much, in fact, as he had been taught to accept whatever else which life seemed sure to bring. Of one thing he felt sure: Lucia did not regard him unfavorably. Perhaps she did not love him,--he was modest enough to admit that there was no possible reason why she should,--yet she had not attempted to withdraw that little hand--bless it!--when he was covering it with kisses. She had appropriated him, in the loveliest way imaginable, not only once but several times during the evening, showing marked preference for him. Perhaps this was not so great a compliment as at first sight it seemed, for, hold his own face and figure in as low esteem as he might, he nevertheless felt sure that the best-looking young man in Miss Dinon’s parlors was plainer and less manly than himself. But if her acceptance of his homage and her selection of him as her cavalier were not enough, there was that jealous look, twice repeated. He informed himself that the look did not become her; it destroyed the charm of her expression; it made her appear hard and unnatural: yet he would not lose the memory of it for worlds. Could it be true, as he had heard while unintentionally a listener, that her father was not rich? Well, he was sorry for him; yet this, too, was a ground for hope. After what he had heard, it was not impossible to believe that perhaps the father of the country youth, with his thirty or forty thousand dollars’ worth of good land, which had been prospected as a possible site for a village of sea-side cottages for rich people, might be no poorer than the father of the city girl. It seemed impossible, as he mentally compared the residences of the two families, yet he had heard more than once that city people as a class seemed always striving to live not only up to their incomes, but as far beyond them as tradesmen and money-lenders would allow.