Thus reassuring himself, he put his purse in his pocket, and glancing again at Rossie’s letter his eye fell upon Miss Belknap’s name, and he laughed aloud as he said: “Poor bald Bee Belknap. She must look comical. I can imagine how it hurts her pride. Buy Rossie’s hair, indeed! I should think not, when that is her only beauty, if I except her eyes, which are too large for her thin face; but that will round out in time, and Rossie may be a beauty yet, though not like Josey; no, never like Josey.” And that brought the young man back to Miss Fleming’s letter, and its imperative request. Could he comply with it now? Ought he not to go at once to the sick mother, who was missing him so sadly, and who had made all the happiness he had ever known at home? Duty said yes, but inclination drew him to Holburton and the fair Josephine, with whom he believed himself to be and with whom he was, perhaps, as much in love as any young man of twenty well can be. Perhaps Rossie had been unduly alarmed; at all events, if his mother were so very sick, his father would write, of course, and on the whole he believed he should go to Holburton by the afternoon train, and then, perhaps, go home. And so the die was cast, and the young man walked to the telegraph office and sent across the wires to Miss Josephine Fleming the three words: “I will come.” CHAPTER II. DR. MATTHEWSON. The train from Ellicottville was late that afternoon. In fact, its habit was to be late, but on this particular day it was more than usually behind time, and the one stage which Holburton boasted had waited more than half an hour at the little station of the out-of-the-way town which lies nestled among the Berkshire hills, just on the boundary line between the Empire State and Massachusetts. The day was hot even for midsummer, and the two fat, motherly matrons who sat in the depot alternately inveighed against the heat and wiped their glowing faces, while they watched and discussed the young lady who, on the platform outside, was walking up and down, seeming wholly unconscious of their espionage. But it was only seeming, for she knew perfectly well that she was an object of curiosity and criticism, and more than once she paused in her walk and turning squarely round faced the two old ladies in order to give them a better view, and let them see just how many tucks, and ruffles and puffs there were in her new dress, worn that day for the first time. And a very pretty picture Josephine Fleming made standing there in the sunshine, looking so artless and innocent, as if no thought of herself had ever entered her mind. She was a pink-and-white blonde, with masses of golden hair rippling back from her forehead, and those dreamy blue eyes of which poets sing, and which have in them a marvelous power to sway the sterner sex by that pleading, confiding expression, which makes a man very tender towards the helpless creature appealing so