and with it the three fire-places, where, in the fall and spring, were burned the twisted knots too bulky for the kitchen stove. This was fourteen years ago, and in that lapse of time Lucy Lennox had gradually fallen in with the family ways of living, and ceased to talk of her cottage in western New York, where her husband had died and where were born her daughters, one of whom she was expecting home on the warm July day when our story opens. Katy Lennox had been for a year an inmate of Canandaigua Seminary, whither she was sent at the expense of a distant relative to whom her father had been guardian, and who, during her infancy, had had a home with Uncle Ephraim, Mrs. Lennox having brought him with her when she returned to Silverton. Dr. Morris Grant he was now, and he had just come home from a three years’ sojourn in Paris, and was living in his own handsome dwelling across the fields toward Silverton village, and half a mile or more from Uncle Ephraim’s farm-house. He had written from Paris, offering to send his cousins, Helen and Kate, to any school their mother might select, and as Canandaigua was her choice, they had both gone thither the year before, but Helen, the eldest, had fallen sick within the first three months, and returned to Silverton, satisfied that the New England schools were good enough for her. This was Helen; but Katy was different. Katy was more susceptible of polish and refinement—so the mother thought; and as she arranged and rearranged the little parlor, lingering longest by the piano, Dr. Morris’s gift, she drew bright pictures of her favorite child, wondering how the farm-house and its inmates would seem to her after all she must have seen during her weeks of travel since the close of the summer term. And then she wondered why cousin Morris was so annoyed when told that Katy had accepted an invitation to accompany Mrs. Woodhull and her party on a trip to Montreal and Lake George, taking Boston on her homeward route. Katy’s movements were nothing to him, unless—and the little ambitious mother struck at random a few notes of the soft-toned piano as she thought how possible it was that the interest always manifested by staid, quiet Morris Grant for her light-hearted Kate was more than a brotherly interest, such as he would naturally feel for the daughter of one who had been to him a second father. But Katy was so much a child when he went away to Paris that it could not be. She would sooner think of Helen, who was more like him. “It’s Helen, if anybody,” she said aloud, just as a voice near the window called out, “Please, Cousin Lucy, relieve me of these flowers. I brought them over in honor of Katy’s return.” Blushing guiltily, Mrs. Lennox advanced to meet a tall, dark-looking man, with a grave, pleasant face, which, when he smiled, was strangely attractive, from the sudden lighting up of the hazel eyes and the glitter of the white, even teeth disclosed so fully to view.