"And so the town isn't much changed?" he asked; "and the different cousins, what has become of them all?" With eager interest she went on telling him of all the old families, who lived in the different houses; how the young girls had grown up--there were so many pretty ones among the cousins!--and the young men had gone into the family offices. Some of them were married and settled down already. "And Aunt Warner's house under the beeches, with its lawn, where we used to play, is it just the same?" "Oh, yes, just the same, only the Bartons live there now--Uncle James's family; and on Thursdays we meet there--I mean the cousins' Tennis Club--and when it rains we dance in the old drawing room. But how shocked dear old Aunt Warner would have been to see us!" Then, as they went through the gateway into the College garden, she added, "I'm afraid all this gossip bores you; it's interesting for us who live at home, but for other people--" "Oh, but I belong to Dalmouth!" he protested. "Of course you do, only it's so long since you've been there," she said in half apology, "and we thought--I thought you didn't care." It was indeed a long time, it was years since he had been there, he remembered with a certain regret for the preoccupation, the youthful intolerance, that had made him half despise his home. It was a charming place after all, the grey seaport town with its wharves, and shipping, and narrow streets, and the pleasant homes and gardens just outside where his cousins and uncles, the merchants, lived--where as a boy he had lived. How well he remembered watching, on summer afternoons, the white sails of the family ships, as they floated up with the tide past the green lawns and square old houses. A pleasant life it must be there, he thought, and quite untroubled in its tranquil interests by any great ambitions or ideas--the echoes of which, indeed, could hardly reach them in their quiet old corner of the world. And, as they talked, the young man began to fancy idly what his own life would have been, had he never gone away from the old Devonshire town. It had been intended, of course, that he should stay there, and take his own part in the family concerns; even yet his uncles were keeping a place for him; and although they feared he was quite spoiled by Oxford, yet they would welcome him back, he knew, should he only give up those ambitions, that to them--and to himself sometimes!--seemed so impossible, so dreamy and unreal. Ruth Ellwood stopped now and then to look at the garden flowers. "What lovely irises, and how quaint those roses are, trained so stiffly on the old walls." "Are you fond of gardening?" he asked.