"By not bearing ill-will when you all got angry," said Lydia with spirit. "And by his conversation with me. He's serious-minded; says he neither drinks, smokes, chews nor swears, and considers life too short to be wasted on dangerous pastimes, like such. He's got a lot of serious books that came in an old book-case his folks bought. He's going to come out here some pleasant night and lend me those books--bring 'em with him. I'd admire to read 'em! Some are biographies of good men, and some are sermons; he says some are obituary sermons. He's a perfect gentleman!" Lydia departed to begin getting a dinner that would inevitably be late at best. "Obituary sermons! Coming to lend them to Lydia! The test of gentlemanhood!" murmured Rob. "Are we witnessing the dawn of a romance?" asked Wythie, whose perceptions in that direction were keener of late. CHAPTER TWELVE ITS SEPARATE ELL "Its no wonder they called it spring," said Prue, coming into the house with her jacket on her arm and her golden hair lying damp on her flushed forehead. "The way it is sprung on us is dreadful. It is a perfect dream of a day, but I'm half dead in these winter clothes, and the day before yesterday we had snow squalls!" She dropped into a chair and threw open the window beside it. "Sore throat weather, Prue!" warned her mother. "You must not sit in a draught when you are so heated. Come over here, dear, you will be cool enough after you have been in the house a little while. May has a trick of masquerading as July without warning us that she is going to change her rôle." "But isn't it delicious?" cried Miss Charlotte, going to the window which Prue had left open as she obeyed her mother, and breathing in the damp, fresh odours of young grass, lilacs, blossoms, and all the haunting, indefinable scents of the spring. Then she half sighed, and stood leaning her head against the window-sash. Rob came in from the kitchen with a voluminous gored apron embracing her closely from collar to hem, and with her bright hair more than usually ringed in moist tendrils, and with her right sleeve flour-dusted from her cake making. "Dear me, how warm it is out by the stove!" she exclaimed. "And Lydia expects Demetrius this evening, so she brought me molasses instead of sugar, and forgot to take the draughts off, after her fire was burning up, so the oven is so scorching hot that my cake has to wait till it can get a chance to rise in the oven before it is burned to a crisp." "I wonder if it is true that Demetrius is going to settle in Fayre?" laughed Prue. "Perfectly true. Lydia says that he is going to be an auctioneer, and it seemed to me that I had never heard of such a happy choice of a profession," said Rob. "I think that affair is going to be serious." "It couldn't be anything else with Lydia as one of the principals," commented Wythie on her way through the room with some branches of apple blossoms for the vases, just catching Rob's last words and their connection.