It did not take long for all Crompton to know that Amy was Col. Crompton's daughter, and that the Colonel had left a paper to that effect, which Mr. Howard had found, and that Eloise had also found the marriage certificate, proving her mother's legitimacy beyond a doubt, and making her sole heir to the Crompton estate. It was Friday night when the travellers returned from the South, and on Saturday morning, Mrs. Biggs's washing day, she heard the news. Leaving her clothes in the suds, and her tubs of rinsing and bluing water upon the floor, she started for the Crompton House, which she reached breathless with haste and excitement, and eager to congratulate Amy and Eloise. "I swan, it 'most seem's if I was your relation," she said, shaking Eloise's hand, and telling her she always mistrusted she was somebody more than common, "and I hope we shall be neighborly. I s'pose you'll live here?" Eloise received her graciously, and said she should never forget her kindness, and told her some incidents of her journey, and, as Mrs. Biggs reported to Tim, "treated me as if I was just as good as she, if she is a Crompton." Ruby Ann came later in the day, genuinely glad for Eloise, and sure that nothing would ever change the young girl's friendship for herself, no matter what her position might be. Many others called that day and the following Monday, and Eloise received them with a dignity of which she was herself unconscious, and which they charged to the Crompton blood. Howard, who was still suffering from a severe cold, kept his room until Jack returned. Then he came out with a feeling of humiliation, not so much that he had lost the estate, as that he had thought to burn the paper which took it from him. This feeling, however, gradually wore off under Jack's geniality and Eloise's friendliness, and Amy's sweetness of manner as she called him Cousin Howard, and said she hoped he would look upon Crompton as his home. Then he was to have twenty thousand dollars when matters were adjusted, and that was something to one who, when he came to Crompton, had scarcely a dollar. His visit had paid, and, though he was not the master, he was the favored guest and cousin, who, at Eloise's request, took charge of affairs after Jack went home to New York. Early in December Jake came from the South, and was welcomed warmly by Amy and Eloise. To the servants he was a great curiosity, with his negro dialect and quaint ways, but no one could look at the old man's honest face without respecting him. Even Peter, who detected about him an order of the bad tobacco which had so offended his nostrils in the letters to his master, and who on general principles disliked negroes, was disarmed of his prejudices by Jake's confiding simplicity and thorough goodness. Taking him one day for a drive around the country and through the village, he bought him some first-class cigars with the thought "Maybe they'll take that smell out of his clothes."