So Richard had said nothing particular of Andy, and now he watched him anxiously, to see the impression he was making, and, as he saw Ethelyn's manner, marveling greatly at this new phase in her disposition. She did not feel half so desolate after seeing Andy, and she let him hold her hand, which he stroked softly, admiring its whiteness, and evidently comparing it with his own. All the Markhams had large hands and feet, just as they were all good-looking. Even Andy had his points of beauty, for his soft brown hair was handsomer, if possible, than Richard's, and more luxuriant, while many a city dandy might have coveted his white, even teeth, and his dark eyes were very placid and gentle in their expression. "Little sister" he called Ethelyn, who though not very short in stature, seemed to him so much younger than he had expected Dick's wife to be that he applied the term "little" as he would to anything which he wished to pet. Ethelyn's hat was laid aside by this time, and the basquine, too, which Andy thought the prettiest coat he had ever seen, and which Eunice, who was bidden to carry Ethelyn's things away, tried on before the glass in Ethelyn's chamber, as she did also the hat, deciding that Melinda Jones could make her something like them out of a gray skirt she had at home and one of Tim's palm-leaf hats. CHAPTER IX DINNER, AND AFTER IT Eunice had not fully seen the stranger, and so, when dinner was announced and Richard led her out, with Andy hovering at her side, she stood ready to be introduced, with the little speech she had been rehearsing about "I hope to see you well," etc., trembling on the tip of her tongue. But her plans were seriously disarranged. Six months before Richard would have presented her himself, as a matter of course; but he had learned some things since then, and he tried not to see his mother's meaning as she glanced from him to Eunice and then to Ethelyn, whose proud, dignified bearing awed and abashed even her. Eunice, however, had been made quite too much of to be wholly ignored now, and Mrs. Markham felt compelled to say, "Ethelyn, this--ah, this is--Eunice--Eunice Plympton." That Eunice Plympton was the hired girl Ethelyn did not for a moment dream; but that she was coarse and vulgar, like the rest of Richard's family, she at once decided, and if she bowed at all it was not perceptible to Eunice, who mentally resolved "to go home in the morning if such a proud minx was to live there."