“Yes,” Louie said; “I am very glad, but I wish there was some place for us besides Judge White’s. You don’t know how I shrink from going there. Would it be very bad to stop at the hotel?” “Yes, darling; very bad,” Fred answered, laughing, as he thought of the surprise in store for her. It was one of the loveliest days in June when the New York train stopped at the Merivale station, where, it seemed to Louie, the whole town was assembled, reminding her of the run and the failure. This crowd, however, was animated by very different feelings; and as cheer after cheer went up, and her hands were grasped by friend after friend, eager to welcome her home, she began to feel faint and nauseated as she had felt sometimes when the shadows were darkest around her. Fred saw it and tried to draw her from the swarming throng to his uncle’s carriage, which the judge told him was waiting for him. “Godfrey Sheldon is here with Jack and Jill,” he said, “and it’s like his impudence to ask you to ride with him, but it’s fitting you should go in my carriage, seeing I’m your kin;” then to Louie he said, as a band struck up a lively strain of welcome, “’Pon my soul, it beats all, how glad the folks are. Why, if ’twas the President and his lady they couldn’t make more of a cotouse. See what ’tis to belong to my family and the Lansings’.” He straightened himself back till he nearly fell over, and Louie straightened, too, and held herself proudly erect, not because she was allied to the Whites and Lansings, but because of some feelings the judge’s words had stirred within her. It was not for him or his pedigree the people were making this demonstration. They were her friends and her father’s; they had forgotten the past, and were glad to have her back, and there was nothing to mar her joy except a wish that she was not going to Judge White’s, where, heretofore, she had only been received as an inferior, to be civilly treated, or patronized, which was worse. She was in the carriage now and Fred was with her, holding her hand, which she had involuntarily stretched out to him in her excitement. The crowd was dispersing rapidly—some in the vehicles which had brought them there, some on wheels, some on foot, and nearly all hurrying in the same direction the carriage was taking. “Where is Nancy Sharp?” Louie asked, as they drove through the town. “That’s so,” Fred answered, as naturally as if her non-appearance had struck him as something strange. “I hear the owner of the house is expected. Perhaps that is keeping her. Shall we drive there first? It will please the old lady.” “No—yes,” Louie answered, with conflicting emotions—a longing to see her old home and a shrinking from it.