I’ve said something in this story about the rapidity with which news travels in Eskimo land, but you ought to see it go in a New England village. It flutters with the pigeons from house-top to house-top. It comes to the doorstep with the morning’s milk, before you are up, and the expressman leaves it with a package at eight at night. You may start the story ahead of you and then follow it down street on a bicycle, but it will leave you a poor second at the far end of the town. Thus it became known before sunset that Harry Desmond, whom everybody thought had been lost in the Arctic, was on his way home, alive and well, and great was the rejoicing thereat. Everybody seemed to take especial pride in the safe return of the young man, and the Adamses were in quite a flutter of excitement about it. “Isn’t it splendid?” said Mrs. Adams to Maisie. “I feel as if Harry quite belonged to us since he pulled you out of the water that day nearly three years ago. He must be almost a grown man now, and you’ve grown up quite a bit yourself. How the time does fly!” Maisie had indeed grown up quite a bit. The change from girlhood to young womanhood, which seems to come so suddenly with the lengthening of the skirt and the doing up of the hair, had come to her, and the coupling of her name so intimately with Harry’s sent a swift flush mantling her round cheek. Harry had been her playmate and friend since early childhood, and now he was coming back grown up, and she was grown up too. She felt her cheeks burn under her mother’s kindly scrutiny, and she hastened to change the subject, but the thought of Harry came back now and then, and the color with it. Harry’s father and Mr. Adams met the two boys in Boston, but Joe left immediately on the train for the Cape. His mother was waiting for him, he knew, and the thought would brook no delay. Mrs. Desmond waited for Harry at the house. She knew that if she came to the station, she could not help laughing and crying over him at once, and the reticence of the New England blood bade her avoid the chance of a scene. Queer thing, the New England blood,—sensitive, full of pathos and lire and enthusiasm, all masked beneath the cool steel of seeming indifference. All the neighbors saw her meet him at the door quite sedately; none of them saw the passion of mother love revealed after the door was shut, nor would she have had them see it for worlds. Harry sat for a long time with his strong brown hands clasped tight in his mother’s slender white ones. Now she wondered at his height and manly strength, again flushed with secret pride at the new look of character and decision in his face, and vowed that she had lost her boy after all,—he was a man now. He told them in brief the story of his adventures, but said nothing of the placer mine and the bargain with Colonel Lane. Somehow he wanted to wait on that, to keep it till the last.