When Alan left college in his Freshman year, and did not go back, but went rather to Europe and Egypt and Japan, it appeared to her myopic optimism that his escapades had been pretty well hushed up by time and distance. After he came home and devoted himself to his club, she could have wished that he had taken up some profession or business; but since there was money enough, she waited in no great disquiet until he showed as decided a taste for something else as he seemed for the present to have only for horses. In the mean while, from time to time, it came to her doctor's advising his going to a certain retreat. But he came out the first time so much better and remained well so long that his aunt felt a kind of security in his going again and again, whenever he became at all worse. He always came back better. As she took the cup of tea that Bessie poured out for her, she recurred to the question that she had partly asked already: "Do you think Alan is getting worse again?" "Not so very much," said the girl, candidly. "He's been at the club, I suppose, but he left the table partly because I vexed him." "Because you what?" "Because I vexed him. He was scolding me, and I wouldn't stand it." Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she said, from a natural satisfaction with Bessie, "I don't see what he had to scold you about." "Well," returned Bessie, and she got her pretty voice to the level of her aunt's hearing, with some straining, and kept it there, "when he is in that state, he has to scold some one; and I had been rather annoying, I suppose." "What had you been doing?" asked her aunt, making out her words more from the sight than from the sound, after all. "I had been walking home with a jay, and we found Alan trying to get in at the front door with his key, and I introduced him to the jay." Miss Louisa Lynde had heard the word so often from her niece and nephew, that she imagined herself in full possession of its meaning. She asked: "Where had you met him?" "I met him first," said the girl, "at Willie Morland's tea, last week, and to-day I found him at Mrs. Bevidge's altruistic toot." "I didn't know," said her aunt, after a momentary attention to her tea, "that jays were interested in that sort of thing."