The supper was very gay. The few guests were all old friends. The youngest members of the family were all there, and the license of a family domestic festival prevailed. The one spectator who did not unbend was Agnes, whose heart was so full of anxieties that her countenance could not lose their trace. She sat by John’s side, however, which was the most favorable place, and listened to all the chatter of the children, who had perfect confidence in their father, and felt in spite of herself a confidence in the eventual fate of Mar which she had never felt before. John Parke was but a stupid man, and he had not been without a feeling that to sweep the little interloper out of his way, if it could be done, was desirable; but that had long died away, and John had come to regard Mar as one of his family, with a little special pity for the delicacy upon which his wife dwelt so much, acquiescing in all her measures of special care for the weakly boy with a more generous and kind motive than hers. John was heartily pleased that Mar had distinguished himself, that it was he almost more than Duke who was the hero of the day. He was pleased with his son’s generosity, and with his nephew’s affection, and with the clamor and pleasure of all the young ones ranged near him, leaving the strangers to be entertained by the mother. Tiny was at her father’s elbow, the youngest of all, the privileged member of the party, at whose sallies everybody laughed, though perhaps they were not very witty. By one of those curious confusions of nature which occur in families, Tiny, who was like her mother--not a Parke at all, as good-natured friends said--had also, in certain aspects of her lively little countenance, a resemblance to Mar, who was a Parke all over except in the point of height. And it had been very agreeable to Mar to find in the baby of his aunt’s nursery a something more feeble, more easily tired, less capable of fatigue than even he himself was considered to be; from which circumstance, and from the fact that the little one had become the playmate of the delicate boy when all the other boys had gone to school, there was a special tie between them. Mar himself was a totally different being here from the mild and sad boy whom Agnes had found alone in the schoolroom accepting his solitary fate with precocious philosophy. Very different dreams were now before his eyes. He had forgotten how likely it was that “something should happen.” The gravest impressions disappear like a passing breath from the consciousness of sixteen. Mar had made a great step in advance by his first appearance in public. He felt himself almost a man with fortune before him. He no longer looked on Reggie and Jack with the uneasy sense of superiority, yet inferiority, which is so bitter at all ages. The sense that he was more advanced than they, of a different kind of being in his boyish premature thoughtfulness, but oh so far behind