Her grandmother acknowledged the introduction, her Aunt Nan also. The Colonel shook hands with Virginia, and reiterated his intention to call upon her at school. “With your permission, my dear madam,” he added, by his cultured manner quite convincing Mrs. Webster that he was a gentleman. Then he hurried aboard his train, and left a gray-eyed girl with a heart beating tumultuously inside a blue suit to go on a waiting northbound train toward Vermont. As his train pulled out from the station, the Colonel completed his sentence. “If they don’t approve of that little girl,” he said to himself, with an emphatic slap upon his knee; “if they don’t approve of her, then they’re-they’re hopeless, as that grandson of mine says, and I shouldn’t care to make their acquaintance further.” Meanwhile Virginia was fixedly gazing out of the window, as the train, leaving Springfield, carried them northward. She tried to be interested in the strange, new country about her; but some way, instead of the crimson maples and yellow goldenrod, there would come before her eyes a cottonwood bordered creek, a gap between brown foothills, a stretch of rolling prairie land, black and green and gold, and in the distance the hazy, snow-covered summits of far away mountains. But with the picture came again Donald’s words—words that made her swallow the lump in her throat, and smile at her grandmother and Aunt Nan. “No, the East isn’t like this—not a bit, and maybe you won’t like it; but you’re too plucky to be homesick, Virginia!” CHAPTER IV VERMONT AS VIRGINIA SAW IT It was not until the afternoon of the second day in Vermont that Virginia wrote her father. The evening before she had said “Good-night” as early as she thought polite to her grandmother, Aunt Nan, and the minister who had come to call, and, upon being asked, willingly stayed to tea, and had gone up-stairs to the room which had been her mother’s to write her father about everything. But somehow the words would not come, though she sat for an hour at the quaint little mahogany desk and tried to write; and it all ended by her going to bed, holding close her mother’s old copy of “Scottish Chiefs,” which Aunt Nan had placed in her room, and forgetting in sleep the thoughts that would come in spite of her. But now that the hardest first night was over, and the first forenoon, which she had spent walking with Aunt Nan, had gone, she must write him all about it. She sat down again at the quaint little desk, over which hung the picture of a girl of sixteen with clear, frank eyes, and began: “Webster, Vermont, Sept. 18, 19— “Father dearest: