Betsey listened enthralled, too filled with breathless delight to heed any other sound. Yet the gate from the lane was flung hastily and noisily open and a man in uniform came striding up the path. She did not even heed when Dick, with joyous cawing, spread wide black wings to fly to the stranger’s shoulder, she only looked up, startled, to see him standing in the inner hallway beyond the workshop door. There was something of Miss Miranda in his bearing, something of her spirit in his dancing eyes. And his voice, somehow, had a faint ring of her father’s when he called up the stair, the same familiar call, but with no note of worried helplessness like Mr. Reynolds’, only the ringing tidings of a brother’s long-desired homecoming— “Miranda, oh, Miranda.” CONCLUSION The summer had slipped away, the garden on the hillside was golden instead of green and old white Dobbin was plowing for autumn’s sowing instead of spring’s. Michael, possessed still of a slight limp and a scar on his seamed forehead, but hale and lusty as before, dug among the potatoes and had no one to tempt him from his habitual silence. Miss Miranda was busy elsewhere and as for Elizabeth and David, the garden and the yellow fields knew them no more. Betsey’s father had come home and had set up his housekeeping in the college town so that he and his daughter need not be separated again. Aunt Susan also had returned, laden with souvenirs, curios, new clothes, and glorious accounts of what she had seen. The descriptions, however, like her collection of photographs, were apt to become a little jumbled when brought out for exhibition, so that Betsey was never really quite certain whether Bermuda was chiefly delightful for its mountain ranges or its shopping, or whether Lake Louise, a marvel of scenic wonder as she understood, was situated in the Canadian Rockies or the Garden of the Gods. As a result she could not feel any sharp or definite regret for what she had missed.