Lydia explained herself also. "I just couldn't sleep, it seemed so lovely. It's my first morning home, you know." "Is it?" responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to conceal. It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away. She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return. "I've been in Europe for a year," she told him, with a dignity that was a reproach. "Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it," he answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of lightness. "Well, you're the most important person there is for me to-day," he told her unexpectedly. Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her momentary pique. He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. "Why, didn't you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going to give me?" Lydia laughed. "Oh, you must tell first! You forget you're the first person I've seen this morning. I'll see what I can do for you after I've seen what you are going to do for me." She added, with a solemnity only half jocular, "But it's ever so much more important in my case, for you're the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had been away." She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, "But you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering." The man took the cluster she held out to him, but only eyed them as he answered, "Oh, I remember you very well. You're a niece of Mrs. Sandworth's, or of her husband's, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton's sister. You're the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and sew while the doctor and I talked, and now," he brought it out rotundly, "you've been to Europe for a year, and you're grown-up." Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. "Well, but I _have_, really and truly," she protested, "all of that. And I just guess you haven't had two such interesting things happen to you in such a short time as--" She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden recollection. "Oh, I beg your pardon," she murmured; "I forgot about what they said you had--"