"We will ask mamma to give us some," answered Sara. She took his arm, and Scar took his other hand; thus together they entered the dining-room. Madam Carroll welcomed them; but placidly, as though the Major's coming was a matter of course. Since his daughter's return, however, it had not been a matter of course: first for this reason, then for that, his meals had almost always been sent to the library. Now he was tired; and now the dining-room floor might be damp after Judith Inches' scrubbing-brush; now there was an east wind, and now there was a west; or else he was not feeling well, and some one might "drop in," in which case, as the dining-room opened only into the hall, which was wide, like a room, he should not be able to escape. In actual fact, however, there was very little "dropping in" at Carroll Farms, unless one should give that name to the visits of the rector, Mr. Owen. Once in a while, in the evening, when the weather was decisively pleasant, the junior warden came to see them. But all their other acquaintances came to the receptions, made a brief call upon the first Thursday afternoon following, and that was all. The sweet little mistress of the mansion had never uttered one syllable upon the subject, yet each member of the circle of Far Edgerley society knew as well as though it had been proclaimed through the town by a herald with a silver trumpet emblazoned with the Carroll arms, that these bimonthly receptions (which were so delightful) and the brief following call comprised all the visits they were expected to pay at Carroll Farms. And surely, when one considered the great pleasure and also improvement derived from these receptions, the four visits a month at the Farms were worth more than forty times four visits at any other residence in the village or its neighborhood. True, Mrs. Hibbard endeavored to maintain an appearance of importance at her mansion of yellow wood called Chapultepec; but as General Hibbard (of the Mexican War) had now been dead eight years, and as his old house had not been opened for so much as the afternoon sewing society since his departure, its importance, socially considered, existed only in the imagination of his relict--which was, however, in itself quite a domain.