As time went on, and the friendship between myself and the General throve, I even allowed myself to be persuaded to read him some chapters of it; and finding him so full of interest and so excellent a critic, I went on with the reading of it as it grew. He had all the love of a story which belonged to the youthfulness of his heart, and I found that the more romantic I grew--and I had been rather shy of the romantic passages at first--the keener grew his interest. Indeed, he took my characters as seriously as if they had been living men and women, and would argue with me vehemently about the exact course of conduct that might have been expected from one or another,--a delightfully flattering thing to an author. In nine cases out of ten he was right, and I was not too proud to accept his suggestions, so that the book, as it grew, came really to have a part of the General in it, and I used to say we had better publish in collaboration. I was going to look for a publisher for _Love in the Valley_, though I did not at all expect to be like those silly people in novels who make tremendous successes with a very first book. I expected to have a very stiff, uphill fight before I should even see my name on the title-page of a book. "And when I do see it," I said to the General, "it will not be my first book. Why, my first book was burnt early in my teens!" The interest the General took in my hero, Maurice Westwater, was something really touching. "However you've managed it, young woman," he said, "you've made a success of that lad. Somehow he reminds me of my own boy." As all the General's suggestions about the development of Maurice's character tended, I felt sure, to make him more and more a portrait of Lance, I was not surprised if, by and by, the likeness came to be more than a shadowy one. One fine September afternoon brought Aline home, and overjoyed I was to see her. The sea-breezes had given her dear fair cheeks a touch of brown which delighted me, while her step was brisk, and her eyes tranquil as I had hardly dared to hope. The very first thing she did when she came into the house, before she removed her wraps, was to go upstairs to Pierce's room, which Oona had kept all those months with drawn blinds. She remained there only a few seconds, but in the time she had drawn up the blinds, and flung all the windows open to the sweet air. "I am going to put the twins next door to you, Hilda," she said when she returned, "and keep for myself that room which has known so much of heaven." While she drank her tea we all gathered about her, and poured out our stories about the new tenant of Rose Hill, and the joys of his domicile. Aline listened with her maternal smile. "What a kind old man he must be!" she said in a pause of the crowding voices. "Not so old as all that amounts to," said one of the boys rather resentfully. "You don't call sixty old, Aline?"