She called Walter her brother, and had watched him through his college course with all a sister’s pride, looking eagerly forward to the time when he would be in her father’s employ, for it was settled that he was to enter Mr. Graham’s bank as soon as he was graduated. And as on that summer afternoon she sat upon the grassy ridge and talked with Ellen of him, she spoke of the coming winter when he would be with her in the city. "It will be so nice," she said, "to have such a splendid beau, for I mean to get him introduced right away. I shall be seventeen in a month, and I’m coming out next season. I wish you could spend the winter with me, and see something of the world. I mean to ask your mother. Father will buy your dresses to wear to parties, and concerts, and the opera. Only think of having a box all to ourselves,—you and I and Walter, and maybe Charlotte Reeves once in a great while, or cousin Jennie. Wouldn’t you love to go?" "No, not for anything," answered Ellen, who liked early hours and quiet rooms, and always experienced a kind of suffocation in the presence of fashionable people, and who continued: "I don’t believe Walter will like it either, unless he changes greatly. He used to have a horror of city folks, and I do believe almost hated _you_ before you came to Deerwood, just because you were born in New York." "Hated _me_, Ellen!" repeated Jessie. "He shook me, I know, and I’ve been a little afraid of him ever since, but it did me good, for I deserved it, I was such a high-tempered piece; but I did not know he hated me. Do you suppose he hates me now?" and Jessie’s manner evinced a deeper interest in Walter than she herself believed existed. Ellen saw it at once, and so did the man who for the last ten minutes had been watching the young girls through the pine tree boughs. William Bellenger had reached Deerwood on the afternoon train, and gone at once to the farm-house, whose gable roof, small window panes, and low walls had provoked a smile of derision, while he wondered what Jessie Graham could find to attract her there. Particularly was he amused with the quaint expressions of Aunt Debby, who, in her high-crowned cap, with black handkerchief smoothly crossed in front, and her wide check apron on, sat knitting by the door, stopping occasionally to take a pinch of snuff, or "shoo" the hens when they came too near. "The gals was in the woods," she said, when he asked for Miss Graham, and she bade him "make Ellen get up if he should find her setting on the damp ground, as she presumed she was. Ellen was weakly," she said, "and wasn’t an atom like Walter, who was as trim a chap as one could wish to see. Did the young man know Walter?" "Oh, yes," returned William. "He is my cousin."