"Well, I tell you I meant to write," Ned persisted, doggedly. "But mother put me all out by going over to the Bend in the afternoon. I was going to take that train, and of course I couldn't; Kensy's house is right there by the station. And I had to take the morning train instead; and it put me all out. I had to get up so early I forgot to take any clothes," he added, resentfully. "It wasn't my fault." "Not your fault?" his father said, and then turned to his wife, almost with a sob. "Milly, can he be our boy, this sneak?" "Yes; yes, he is, Tom; indeed he is, dear. And he just forgot; he didn't mean anything wrong." Milly was almost voluble, and she was crying hard. And then she looked at the woman who had brought him back--the faded, anxious, simpering woman, who for once had no words ready. Milly looked at her, and suddenly opened her arms and took her son's elderly wife to her heart. "Oh, you poor woman," she said, "how unhappy you must have been at home!" Helen looked at her blankly, then dropped her head down on the kind shoulder, and Milly felt her quiver. "She's fifty!" Tom said, trembling with anger. "How the devil a son of mine can be such a jack--" "Tom, dear! there now, _don't_," the mother said; "he's at home. Just think; he's at home! and we thought--we thought--" Her voice broke. "We'll all love you, Miss Hayes--I mean Helen," she whispered to the sobbing woman. Then, with a sort of gasp, she put her daughter-in-law's arms aside gently, and went over and kissed her husband. As for Thomas Dilworth, after the first shock of anger and mortification had passed, and the young couple had finally settled themselves upon the disgusted bounty of the respective fathers, he used to whistle incessantly a certain song much in vogue at the time: "I hanker To spank her, Now I'm her papa!" "AN EXCEEDING HIGH MOUNTAIN" I Robert Gray's first wife, Alys (Old Chester had hard work to swallow her name; "but it's better than any of your silly 'ie's,'" said Old Chester)--this first Mrs. Gray was a good deal of a trial to everybody. She was not only "new," but foreign; not only foreign, but indifferent to Old Chester. Indeed, it took all Old Chester's politeness and Christian forbearance to invite Mrs. Robert Gray to tea--with the certainty that the invitation would be declined. She was an English girl whom Robert met somewhere in Switzerland--a heavy-eyed, silent creature, certainly a very beautiful woman, but most inefficient and sickly; and there were so many nice, sensible girls in Old Chester! (However, there is no use saying things like that: as if a man ever married a girl because she was sensible!)