"I can see that you are not averse to the fleshpots. I dare say your bachelor establishment is a model. Don't the neighbors try to break in and steal the help? As I remember Fanny she always took the easiest way round. Which is Kate's house, the one beyond the next, or the third?" "The second; she came next. There's nothing in between your old house and Kate's place." Amzi met his sister's eyes with a scrutiny that expressed mild surprise that she should thus make necessary a reference to her former domicile, and with somewhat less interest than she had taken in the ancestral china. To Amzi her return was a fact of importance, and since receiving her telegram from New York announcing her visit to Montgomery he had been in the air as to its meaning. Jack Holton's appearance only a few weeks earlier still agitated the gossips. He assumed that Lois knew nothing of this, as, indeed, she did not; but there was nothing in his knowledge of his sister to encourage the belief that she would have cared if she had known. His old love for her warmed his heart as he watched her across the table. In the one interview he had had with her after her flight,--an hour's talk in Chicago,--he had not so fully realized as now, in this domestic setting, how gracefully she bore her years and her griefs! It was this that puzzled him. Sorrow was not written in her still youthful face, nor was it published in her fine brown eyes. They were singularly lovely eyes--retaining something of their girlish roguishness. His masculine eye saw no hint of gray in her brown hair. She was astonishingly young, not only in appearance but in manner, and her vivacity--her quick smile, her agreeable murmurous laughter--deepened his sense of her charm. She had not only been his favorite sister in old times; but through all these years he had carried her in his heart. And though his restraint yielded before her good humor he was appalled by the situations--no end of them!--created by her return. Not a soul knew of her coming. As he reflected that his sisters were even then dining tranquilly in their several domiciles, quite oblivious of the erring Lois's proximity, he inwardly chuckled. They had for years been "poor-Loising" Lois, and Jack Holton's re-appearance had strengthened their belief that she was in straitened circumstances, a pensioner on Amzi; and they deplored any drain upon resources to which they believed themselves or their children after them justly entitled. They would be outraged to learn that the prodigal had reentered by the front door of her father's house, followed by a wagonload of trunks, presumably filled with fine raiment.