She touched a silver bell beside her, and ordering dinner to be sent up at once, went on to ask her son concerning his journey, and the people he had met. But Wilford, though intending to tell her all, for he kept nothing from his mother, would wait till after dinner. So, offering her his arm, he led her out to where the table was spread, widely different from the table prepared for Katy Lennox away among the Silverton hills, for where at the farmhouse there had been only the homely wares common to the country, with Aunt Betsy's onions served in a bowl, there was here the finest of damask, the choicest of china, the costliest of cut-glass, and the heaviest of silver, with the well-trained waiter gliding in and out, himself the very personification of strict table etiquette, such as the Barlows had never dreamed about. There was no fricasseed chicken here, or flaky crust, with pickled beans and apple sauce; no custard pie with strawberries and rich, sweet cream, poured from a blue earthen pitcher, but there were soups, and fish, and roasted meats, and dishes with French names and taste, and desert elaborately gotten up and served with the utmost precision, and wines, with fruit and colored cloth, and handsome finger bowl; and Mrs. Cameron presiding over all, with the ladylike decorum so much a part of herself, her soft, glossy silk of brown, with her rich lace and diamond pin seeming in keeping with herself and her surroundings. And opposite to her Wilford sat, a tall, dark, handsome man of thirty or thereabouts--a man whose polished manners betokened at once a perfect knowledge of the world, and whose face to a close observer indicated how little satisfaction he had as yet found in that world. He had tried its pleasures, drinking the cup of freedom and happiness to its very dregs, and though he thought he liked it, he often found himself dissatisfied and reaching after something which should make life more real, more worth the living for. He had traveled all over Europe twice, had visited every spot worth visiting in his own country, had been a frequenter of every fashionable resort in New York, from the skating pond to the theatres, had been admitted as a lawyer, had opened an office on Broadway, acquiring some reputation in his profession, had looked at more than twenty girls with the view of making them his wife, and found them as he believed, alike fickle, selfish, artificial and hollow-hearted. In short, while thinking far more of family, and accomplishments, and style, than he ought, he was yet heartily tired of the butterflies who flitted so constantly around him, offering to be caught if he would but stretch out his hand to catch them. This he would not do, and disgusted with the world as he saw it in New York, he had gone to the Far West, roaming a while amid the solitude of the broad prairies, and finding there much that was soothing to him, but not discovering the fulfillment of the great want