"It's not _her_ doing," he resumed, hastily, striking out at some indistinct enemy lurking behind the old man's looks. "No ceremony could make us surer of each other. That's why we're not unhappy. It's exactly the same as if we were married." "_Exactly?_" He eyed the young face shrewdly, and then, a little baffled by its mixture of sensitive shrinking and frank defiance: "You will oblige me by not keeping this appointment"--he motioned to the letter. "I'm sorry I can't oblige you, sir." "Reflect a moment." "I can't even reflect about it. She's going away to-morrow to spend several months with her sister. After that she goes back to Vassar. I may not see her again till next summer." "You don't mean she's going back to school this fall?" "Yes. She lost a year. They couldn't afford-- But now she's going to finish her course." "Good Lord!" "I beg your pardon." "There's no reason why she shouldn't go back to school?" "Reason why--? No." A light broke, or rather a darkness spread, over the young man's face, wiping out the grace, stamping it fiercely with detestation of him who had dared think insulting thoughts of Almira. But the old man was smiling and rubbing his parchment hands. "Tempest in a teacup! Come and have breakfast," he said, walking to the table; "everything's getting cold." But Ethan put the letter of the clerkly hand into his breast-pocket, and went towering out of the room. Aaron Tallmadge chuckled genially as he rang for hot buckwheat cakes. "Romantic! absurd! Great baby!" he muttered, and opened the morning paper--his paper--Ethan's by-and-by. Ethan had not needed his grandfather's recommendation to abstain from mentioning in any letter to Mrs. Gano that her more and more irregular correspondent had been ill that last severe winter before he came of age, or that he considered himself engaged to be married to a girl older than himself and penniless. Mr. Tallmadge persistently affected to put this last achievement aside as sheer youthful nonsense. But those letters in the misleading hand came to Ashburton Place with irritating regularity. He began secretly to await with no small anxiety Ethan's view of the moral as well as legal liberty conferred by the distinction of being twenty-one. Before that moment arrived, the doctors were agreeing that the young man must not, till his health should be established, spend another Christmas in New England. "At the end of the Indian summer away with him." "By all means," said Mr. Tallmadge. "Why wait even for the summer? All he needs is a thorough change." The old man was thinking--thinking not alone of the health, but ambitiously of the future, of his grandson. "Where shall I send him?" asked Mr. Tallmadge. "It doesn't much matter where he is in the summer," the doctors agreed; "but get him south of Mason and Dixon's line next winter."