and saluting her as mother, kissing him quietly, properly, as the Camerons always kissed. She was very glad to have Wilford home again, for he was her favorite child; and brushing the rain-drops from his coat she led him to the fire, offering him her own easy-chair, and starting herself in quest of another. But Wilford held her back, and making her sit down, he drew an ottoman beside her, and then asked her first how she had been, then where his sisters were, and if his father had come home—for there was a father, a quiet, unassuming man, who stayed all day in Wall street, seldom coming home in time to carve at his own dinner table, and when he was at home, asking for nothing except to be left by his fashionable wife and daughters to himself, free to smoke and doze over his evening paper in the seclusion of his own reading-room. As Wilford’s question concerning his sire had been the last one asked, so it was the last one answered, his mother parting his dark hair with her jeweled hand, and telling him first that, with the exception of a cold taken at the Park on Saturday afternoon, she was in usual health—second, that Juno was spending a few days in Orange, and that Bell had gone to pass the night with her particular friend, Mrs. Meredith, the most bookish woman in New York. “Your father,” the lady added, “has not yet returned; but as the dinner is ready I think we will not wait.” 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, 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 among the Silverton hills, for where at the farm-house 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 dessert elaborately gotten up, and served with the utmost precision, and Mrs. Cameron presiding over all with lady-like decorum, her soft glossy silk of brown, with her rich lace and diamond pin in perfect 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 the world.